Speaker 1Welcome to APAC's B2B Growth Podcast by X-Growth. I'm Shane Hoda, and on this show,
Speaker 2we're going to be unpacking trends, busting myths, and delivering insights you can put to work today to drive growth in APAC. AI has made marketing easier to produce, but harder to win. That's not a hot take, that's a diagnosis. And once you hear it, you can't unsee what's happening in every marketing team right now. My guest today is Cameron Patridge, Chief Growth Officer at HumanForce. He spent nearly a decade in the US, most recently as CMO of Invisible Technologies, working directly with OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Microsoft while the AI boom was happening in real time. And now he's back in Australia, building a marketing function for a world most teams aren't ready for. In this conversation, we get into why specialist roles are disappearing, what Cameron is actually hiring for now, why marketing has been too comfortable staying out of the revenue conversation, and why that needs to change. We also talk about system thinking and go-to-market engineering role, and his honest take on which marketing jobs face the most disruption ahead. If you lead a marketing team, or you're trying to figure out where your career goes from here, this episode is for you. Let's dive in.
Speaker 1Cameron, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Thanks, Shahain. Good to be here. I'm very excited for this chat. If you could give a little bit of context about the work that you've done before, and what were you doing before HumanForce, that would be fantastic.
Speaker 3So, look, first of all, really excited to be here, excited to see where we can go with this. Yeah, look, I'll give you a quick summary of my career, and then we'll go from there. Then we'll get into the meat and potatoes, as you say. Just returned to Australia after 10 years in the US. I did a few different roles, I was in the US, which I'll come to in a second. But before I moved to the US in sort of 2016, I was typically working for big Australian brands, right? So like Medibank and Telstra and GE Capital, which is now Latitude Financial, and got a little bit bored with it, or I think the sort of career path was a bit predictable for me there. And so I decided to challenge myself, packed up and moved to New York City without a job, which was probably overly confident. It was a bit harder to get a job than I thought it was. But look, eventually landed one, and over the space of nearly 10 years had sort of three different roles. One for BBTO, the big advertising agency. One for Macquarie Group, running marketing there. And then landed in a company called Invisible Technologies at the end, which was a small startup at the time doing $25, $30 million revenue, and just starting to explore AI training. And was lucky enough to land there when sort of the AI boom kicked off. And over the space of my two and a bit years there, we fortified extra revenue up to nearly $2 billion. 200 million run rate. And we're lucky enough to work with the likes directly with ChatGPT, and OpenAI, and Meta, and Google, and Microsoft, and all these kind of large language or foundational model providers, like really directly. And so got a really good front seat window into seeing what was happening in the AI world, what it's really capable of, what you need to do to build really powerful AI systems, and also the limitations. And so did that for a few years. It was an amazing experience. But home calls and came back about a year ago, and I'm now at Humanforce.
Speaker 1That gives you such an interesting insight into some of the questions that I want to ask you. And where I want to start is, how do you think the marketing org is going to change with what is happening with AI? What's coming for the marketing function?
Speaker 3From a function perspective and like an org, structure perspective, there's sort of like a few different things, right? But I think like the function itself is going to change dramatically. You move into sort of most, at least my experience of sort of when I first came back to Australia and started interviewing, most org structures and functions were built for like channel managers. You know, you've got paid search specialists and SEO specialists. I think that world sort of disappears, but I'll touch on that structure a little bit more in a minute. What's going to happen to the function is it's going to dramatically change. What you're really seeing now, is the AI slop is now a word that everyone's sort of quite comfortable and familiar with. But a thing I always say is that AI has made marketing easier to produce but harder to win, right? The sort of the floor of what good marketing is has dropped dramatically. So there's a lot of really average crappy marketing out there now. And I think that means it's incumbent upon us, as marketers to like really lean into trust and high quality of work and more creativity, because I think it's so easy to produce and execute at scale now that the real way you're going to win is by producing meaningful assets or meaningful marketing that really moves the needle. And so I think what that really means is less content execution, which is like, where everyone thinks AI is really supporting growth and more sort of into the decision science world, right? Because it's so easy right now to spin up thought leadership in a B2B setting in five seconds to create a really cool B2C campaign video in a few minutes. And that is like just completely destroying originality. And so I think we're going to have to get away from this like execute at all costs mentality. And I think that means moving up the value chain from a less execution and more thinking.
Speaker 1Can you unpack that a little bit more in terms of, you know, you said we're going towards more meaningful content. You said something around decision making content. Can you unpack that? What do you mean by that? As far as I'm concerned,
Speaker 3AI is collapsing marketing as a function, right? And we'll talk about how that sort of plays out in an org structure. But you know, historically we used to have people in content, you know, who people are responsible for content and people responsible for like paid search and people responsible for graphic design. Now I can do all that myself, right? And so the whole like marketing discipline is collapsed into your ability to do multiple disciplines and execute at scale is much easier now than it's ever been. That's great, right? But it's got a few sort of negative knock on impacts as far as I'm concerned. One, the very specialist, roles that we've sort of traditionally had in these org structures, they will disappear. And two, yeah, it is easy to produce a lot of crap marketing. And so I think in order to produce winning marketing, we need to move away from the we've got to execute at all costs, right? And I think the only way to do that is to focus more on your insights, more on your analytics, leverage AI to get cross platform insights, right? I've recently built a tool where I'm looking at, you know, Google AdWords, GA, Google analytics, LinkedIn, Reddit, tracking competitor websites, tracking trends in the market, tracking SEM rush for what people are bidding on. And I've pulled it all together in like a single dashboard that gives me a real cross industry cross platform view. And it's so easy to do that these days. And I think historically marketing has had a lot of, a lot of data silos, but I think with AI these days, it's much easier to collate that information and bring in your own first party data. And I think when you're able to do that, then you can create something meaningful to market. Unfortunately, most people are just going, let's do that. This is a cool idea. Let me just do a quick chat with chatty and you know, it'll pop something out and that's good enough. We won't even check it. And so I think we've almost become lazy as marketers, right? And forgotten. What it really means to do good marketing, which is like, start thinking a bit more, do a bit of research, get to the heart of the problem you're solving. We've kind of forgotten that.
Speaker 1Let's talk about the org, the organizational structure. So specialists are going away to let's, let's unpack that. Let's unpack what are some of the, what are some of the main changes you think the org is going to have? Um, maybe, maybe specialists are one of them there. Are there more, tell me a little bit about where, where your head is at over there.
Speaker 3Yeah. So there's a few interesting things going on. Here, right? So I was reading something the other day, which talked about marketing's increased individual productivity, but hasn't actually increased organizational productivity because people are doing things in silos, right? And it's like, go and build this, go and build this, go and build this. And they're not thinking about how it integrates, um, into the sort of broader business strategy. And so it's created an enormous amount of handoffs across the business, right? A lot of inconsistency and a lot of noise and, you know, as marketers, we love a new shiny tool. And so we'll go and bring in a new tool and we'll go from Claude to chat GPT to Leonardo today. And we'll just like bounce between these different things and like, have a lot of fun and not really think about what we're actually creating. And so we've created a lot of operational mess, right? And I think that's going to get worse and worse as I sort of starts to extrapolate across sort of individual use within businesses and businesses themselves. And so, I think there's two parts that one, you've got to streamline your organization to sort of control. the source of all this new information and so i think you probably need less executing roles notwithstanding the fact that ai agents and you know open claw and claude and all that can do this execution that people used to be able to do it can do it much faster and probably to a higher quality these days so that sort of reduces the need for more people in those execution only roles and so all of that i think leans into we probably need less true executors and i think more generalists people who can work across different disciplines you know i gave the example of i can do like graphic design and content and paid search all in one role now sort of and so i think you can the real successful marketing team to the future will lean into that like really smart generalists who to my earlier point do a lot more thinking you can do a lot more thinking you can do a lot more thinking sit down and work out what problem we're trying to solve they'll use the llms to execute on that challenge and then they'll do a bit of qa and testing and so less executors less channel specialists right because you know tell me someone who can do a excel analysis better than claude you know in five minutes no one can right unless you're a genius and there's not many of them in the market and so i think those very specific roles where you focused on things those people people in those roles they're going to have to start thinking more broadly right how do i contribute um to the business in a more holistic way rather than just paid search or rather than just seo or rather just email or website uptake um we've got to start thinking across the whole marketing value chain because if we don't have people doing that these large language models are going to do it for
Speaker 1you you're you're obviously in a position of hiring and and you have a team how have you changed the way that you hire people um what do you what are you kind of looking for what are you not looking for i'm really keen to hear that as well
Speaker 3it's funny yeah i used to hire for the the deep channel expertise right and if i go back to my experience at invisible you know there was a bit of luck there you know working in a company that was focusing on training these ai models at the time it was really blowing up but you know you need a little bit of luck and then you need like really excellent excellent people to execute on that vision and i think our sort of competitive advantage for invisible in the us was just hire the best people and not so much super deep expertise but people who are willing to work through the mess who have like a bit of this sort of neural plasticity where they're like they get thrown a really difficult challenge and instead of backing away from it and saying it's not my job they're like okay let's try and work this out and so that has really changed my hiring philosophy completely when you think about what i was just talking about before about this deep expertise in these channel specialists these large language models can do that better than anyone with deep expertise in these worlds right anymore and so i'm not so much hiring for deep expertise in any one particular function or discipline i'm now hiring for people who show um a willingness to just go out and get shit done to be completely honest people who are really willing to take accountability for outcomes and so i'm hiring much more on culture than than anything else because the world is changing so rapidly i just need people who are resilient and can move with the times and are much more interested in outcomes than reporting on activity or trying to save their job it makes it really hard for my recruiters right because i'm like we've got to hire for like cultural fit claudia and she's like okay my briefs are quite vague because i know what i'm looking for but it's like really hard for me to sort of translate that into you know a recruiter's asks because you're
Speaker 1not looking at skills right like how i'm looking for this person who has they tick this box on salesforce whatever thing or they tick this box on email marketing not necessarily looking for
Speaker 3that no not at all it's like real outcomes tied to revenue we'll talk about marketing only in revenue in a little bit i suspect but you know commercial acumen and accountability like i want to drive improved financial performance for the business so they can talk to those examples really really clearly and yeah and then like tell me about a time you were given a problem you didn't know what to do it was really hard you sort of had nowhere to go but you worked it out like what was it how did you work through it where what were the sort of brick walls you ran into and how did you get around them those kind of questions i think are really important alongside you know why you big interest in joining this company and this role you know when you speak to a lot of people they're like oh because i'm not really happy in my current job and i'm just like i'm just like that was you exactly that was your opportunity to pitch me i know all about the company this role is particularly exciting because if you do not have the capability and the sort of awareness to do a deep research on the company and the role and talk about your current situation instead that's just one of those cultural flags for me right so i i totally
Speaker 1get the concept of generalist are there certain roles that you still or certain skills that you still think are really critical or maybe even more critical like one of the things that you start to see now in the market is a lot of organizations hire content writers in in some situations that yeah pretty good salaries of storytellers um right i've i've seen that the title storyteller come up a couple of times in google cloud hiring and um or voice of ceo content writer um right so there there's there's kind of that angle that is happening or i kind of seen glimpses of it but curious to know are there again skills or areas that you were doubling down on or are you thinking of doubling down and saying you know this is actually really
Speaker 3critical yeah i've seen those like storytellers and the you know the personal content assistant to the ceo and those posts go viral yeah i don't i don't know if i believe them to be honest i think it's mostly lip service i suspect the people in those roles come up with like a really creative idea and then chuck it into one of the models anyway to refine it maybe it's a little bit more top down thinking but they're still using those models to execute but it's really just indicative of the trend right when there's like so much slop out there how do we get something that's truly unique now do we need people in those roles permanently i don't think so i think a really smart prompt with a little bit of thinking up front is going to get you 95 in the way there and then you just have to my earlier point really smart people who care about the outcomes double checking it job done like i don't know if you need people like deep content specialists in that world anyway do you need really powerful creative minds yeah i think like that becomes an unlock in the future you know we talk about my experience at invisible and you know what ai is at the moment what it's super powerful that um you know deep analysis really high processing power it's getting a thing that i don't see it like catching up too soon is like that nuance and contextual understanding contextual awareness and so that's where i think like in like an increased focus on creativity it's going to be really important that's hard in some businesses right you know b2c you've probably got a really great chance to sort of leverage that creativity and sort of insert it into marketing in b2b sometimes you know professional services like sometimes that's like hard right how do you sell consulting creatively you know that's not the world i'm in but that's a great challenge to have right like it's kind of if we just take that industry it's kind of been boring marketing for a long time right so you a lot of shades of blue yeah yeah yeah deep blue deep blue yeah deep trust yeah um but like what a great challenge for them now right is to like pull themselves out of that world and just really think about what they need to do to move the needle so i think creativity hard to test for but that's something that won't go away and you know just to reinforce it i think deep like deep specific skills there are probably some but but i'm i'm much more in the do they have a flexible mindset do they look at problems and go i can solve this can they bring people together can they ask the right questions um and is there like a relentless focus on outcomes i think they're going to survive now that's more a personality trait the one thing i think as marketers we need to be better at is systems thinking right there is controversial
Speaker 1not really but i understand what
Speaker 3you're saying well it's just there so there's a few different things here right like i talked about it before marketers love a new shiny tool and so we'll go out and acquire the next new tool and then and you know the next new one the next new one and i think most of this is in service of trying to protect our jobs because we don't really know what we're doing in the first place right and so we've built this sort of interwoven web of complexity where there's like so many different tools. Uh, and now we're gonna like throw AI over the top of that or introduce Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever tool you want, it's just creating more and more noise, right? The AI slop's a good example of it. Like it's so easy to create content, but creates more handoffs. And so, you know, marketers are not, you know, I don't think in particularly like really great at like the operations side and, you know, building workflows and really strong QA and having really high standards about how things move through a particular process. It's kind of 50%, this like creativity of 50% systems thinking, and that's like really hard to balance, right? With a brain, you're either left, left brain or right brain. But I think as marketers, we've got to, we've got to find a way to balance those.
Speaker 1Oh, absolutely. And, and, uh, I mean, tool, you, you bring up tools and it's just such an interesting conversation. Okay. I feel like for the longest time, marketing has been preaching. We've got to move away from tools and got to think about process and strategy first. And I feel like AI came and everyone's like, no, no, no, we're going back to the tool. Let's let's bring the, no, no, no, just tool, which AI platform are you using? No, no, no, no. It's like, it's gone full swing back to the tool conversation. Um, but you talked about something that I want to go and, and dive a little bit deeper in with regards to the ownership of revenue. Tell me a little bit. A little bit about how are the responsibility of the, uh, responsibilities of the marketing function or change.
Speaker 3Yeah. So, I mean, I operate in a B2B world right now, historically, I've done a bit of B2C and I think, you know, those people in sort of B2C marketing don't know how lucky they've got it with that sort of ability to tie, you know, click through to conversion in a single session and like a really clean way to say we generated this much revenue from this much spend. B2B, you know, particularly with like sales led, um, models. So, you know, if you're in a B2B world where, you know, it could take three, six, nine, 12 months, even longer, sometimes to get a conversion. That's so hard. Good luck with that. That's so hard. Yeah. Well, I mean, I laugh at people talking about having cracked attribution, right? Because I was talking about that at GE in 2013, and I have still haven't walked into an organization where they're like, yeah, we cracked it. Yeah. We're so confident. And the CEO is going, yeah, absolutely. They've got it. You know, you know, this delusional. Marketing CMO, who thinks I've got cracked attribution and the CEO has got a very different perspective, but it's really art in the B2B world. So I think, you know, in a way we've kind of confused activity with outcomes, you know, when you've got a three, six, nine, 12 months sales cycle, and you've got to like fill in the gaps for that 12 months, like look at all the stuff I'm doing. You know, that's when we get to the let's start, you know, reporting on impressions and likes and video. completions and all these things that may contribute to revenue or a closed sale may i don't know if i've ever seen anyone go yeah this this many impressions led to this many hundred thousand dollars of revenue in a b2b setting and so we've got to ditch that right we've got to move away from the reporting on activity we've got to move towards reporting on outcomes and instead of in a b2b setting instead of like you know just reporting on revenue when revenue can be 12 months away i think there's a real opportunity for marketing to play more of a going back to the systems thinking point more of a commercial architect sort of layer right like the real driving force behind generating revenue and so that means moving away from we generated 10 000 leads right to we generated 10 sales qualified opportunities that are really high quality and we've got to move away from that and so i think that's high quality. And then it means getting super tight at the operational level with sales teams, right? Helping them drive pipeline meetings, helping them define ICP and the people they should go after. I don't think marketing has really done that. It's always been marketing generates leads in this corner and sales converts leads over in this corner. And there's always been like that tension where it's marketing says we generated great leads, but sales aren't converting them. It's their fault. And then sales will come back and say, the leads are crap. Of course we can't convert them. And so somehow we've got to repair that relationship. I think marketing is, is like the best place to do it because of all the tools we use, the sort of nature of the complexity of the world we operate within, the true understanding of the customer, the sort of creative mindset we can bring. You know, marketing is one of those disciplines that really works across the whole business, right? I can be working with HR one day on an employee value proposition and how we're attracting more people into the market. Then I'll be working with finance next on what our pipeline model looks like, right? And then product and how we like market the product more effectively. And so we're in a really good position to stitch that whole commercial layer together. And so I think it's really important that we're working with HR one day on an employee value proposition and how we're attracting more people into the market. And so I think it's really important that we're working with HR one day on an employee value proposition and how we like together and be the driving force for revenue. But I think we've sort of stayed in our lane a little bit too much. And do you think we're
Speaker 1going to get to revenue or do you think we're going to get, we're just going to go further down the funnel in terms of ownership? Because I feel like there is, we own revenue, which is, you know, in my opinion, it's a, it's a, there's a lot of things in revenue that marketing can't control. Right. That it's in the sales territory. Um, so do you think it's going to go all the way there or you think it's going to be more around the, you know, like, just like you said, it's more qualified meetings that are held, right. Where it's a hundred percent there to revenue, but it's, it's closer than where we're at. What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 3Yeah, I think it has to go all the way to revenue. And I think what you're sort of describing there, at least what landed in my brain was marketing. I think it's still just wanting to play a part in the revenue generation sort of funnel. I think it has to be a shared goal or a shared KPI. And I think marketing's job is to get the highest quality leads as possible to a sales leader. And the sales leader's job is to convert that. If either of those people don't do their job effectively, then no one wins. And so I think we've got to sort of blur the lines of marketing and sales. Someone has to own it. And I think right now sales owns it because they get the person to sign on the dotted line or they do the handshake. There's such friction in that process. And so marketing may not own revenue in the traditional sense, but we have to have a shared outcome with sales to do that. And honestly, there's a world where I really believe someone has to own that final number. I believe with the sort of the AI collapsing functions within marketing, I believe we have to go further upstream and own that revenue. Otherwise CROs, chief revenue officers will take it and marketing will report into the chief revenue officer. Right. And I think you're seeing, you know, my title now is chief growth officer because it's, it's more of that. It's mostly marketing, but it's also getting super close to sales and working in a really coordinated manner. I think you'll see more of these kind of merged roles.
Speaker 1Who own funnel end to end chief growth officer, chief commercial officer.
Speaker 3There's pipeline coverage. So the amount of leads we're able to bring in, and then there's like closed one, which is the actual revenue bulked. And so in a traditional sense, marketing probably owns more of the pipe generation side and sales owns more of the closed one. But I report out on both. I report out on like marketing sourced revenue that eventually closed, even if a salesperson closed it. And so that's kind of one metric. That I use all the time. Um, you know, you can go even further by like doing that at a channel level. I think what, you know, this is a B2B sort of direction, but weighted pipeline is always great. And if you can measure that across the whole funnel, it's like a really interesting indicator. I can sort of generate a lead that you might want to have a conversation with, but it looks like a pretty poor lead. So it's got 2% chance of converting, but we think the contract is worth a million dollars. What's that? $20,000 or something. You're not going to like push, um, that lead through. So I think like weighted pipeline throughout really forces you to move on quality rather than just volume of leads.
Speaker 1The other question that I have is, is around the marketing leaders, what should they be doing today? Right. For, for them to prepare themselves for what is coming. Right. I'm a, I'm a marketing leader. I've kind of had this role or similar roles and it could be a marketing. Director or, you know, the VP of whatever it is. What do I need to be doing today to be ready for two years time?
Speaker 3Great question. And I'll, I'll bring like a recent. real-life example on this, right? So we were talking about how I hire before. You know, I also hire for people's sort of willingness to experiment and play around with AI. And so I think getting on the tools to learn AI is actually really, really powerful. What I have seen in some of the slightly more mature people I've sort of interviewed with when I asked the AI question is they're like, well, I'm doing a course. I think courses are like the worst way to learn AI. One, because as soon as you finish it, it's out of date, right? You know, you just got to look at, you know, three or four weeks ago, they were talking about Claude is going to bring out a Figma killer. And like the people have trained on Figma for years, right? And know it really well. And then Claude brings out, you know, Claude design and all of a sudden anyone in the world can do that. And so my point there is that like, AI is moving so fast that if you do a course that takes you two weeks, two week course is fine, right? As long as you get through it, but you can have to do another one in three months.
Speaker 1But someone had to kind of master to put the course together, right? So there's, there's wait time there as well, right? So, so some design comes out, there's no course on it today. Somebody has to kind of like really get the command and then be like, all right. And then out of that pool, some of them are course creators. And then, you know, they're kind of-
Speaker 3And then some of them are like fake, like LinkedIn AI experts who are selling. But yeah, I think like the course approach is wrong because it's going to, it's going to be slow. It's going to change. You're not really going to learn anything and it's not hands-on tools. And I think I've seen people really struggle in organizations because there's so much choice and they're like, I'm sort of paralyzed by fear. I don't know where to start. I'm like, I've got this tool over here. I've got this tool over here. And they inevitably, sit still for like four, six, eight weeks. And that's a lifetime in AI. Just get on the tools as a leader, CEO at HumanForce. I talk about this a lot. He wanted to change our website for years. I was brand new in the role and he sort of came back on a Monday and said, I've just rebuilt, you know, our whole website over the weekend. He just vibe coded a whole, you know, like corporate, like fully hardened website and backend in a weekend. And it was such a great motivation for me. I'm like, the CEO is doing this stuff, Ryan. I'm back out of that. And it was like my whole world, my whole view on the world has changed because of what I've seen is possible. And so I just encourage people to like get on the tools and learn. Don't try and do a course too slow. It's not going to help you. It's going to be out of date straight away. So that's, that's the first thing. That's how you learn.
Speaker 1Can I, can I, because there's, there's, I'm guessing there's more coming on this, on this one, I'm really keen to hear how you're doing it, right? Because there's an element of I'm overwhelmed or just so many tools. Like, what do I do? Do I do Gemini? Do I do co-pilot? Do I do Claude? But then those are the main LLMs. Then there's like outside of that, there's a whole hundreds of tools where you're kind of constantly overwhelmed. And can you talk a little bit about how you do
Speaker 3that for yourself? Try and steer clear of the noise. I try and pick two or three things that I use regularly and try and master that. Honestly, just the large language models, various different sort of iterations of them.
Speaker 1Which one, which one is your?
Speaker 3Well, I used to, so I used to use a chat GPT a lot, right? And I think that was a go-to for a lot of people. And I used it for everything. And then, you know, they brought out, you know, their reasoning model, which sort of goes through the reasoning of the decisions it's making and sort of starts coordinating with itself on what the outcome should be. And it just kind of slowed it down a lot. Don't have that much patience when it, when it comes to getting things done. And so I'd always played around with Claude a little bit and then moved over to Claude and now I'm kind of stuck in that world. And I'm sure, you know, six months from now and chat GPT will have another evolution and it might pull people back. But right now I'm using chat GPT more like I have historically used Google. Okay. So you're still, okay.
Speaker 1So you're still using chat GPT.
Speaker 3Yep. Yep. But much more daily engagement, quick questions like, you know, today I was, want to go on holiday. I think it's somewhere in the Pacific or Southeast Asia. Want great weather. It's going to be in May, et cetera, et cetera. I think chatty is like good for that. Can't believe I just said chatty. Um, that's an Australian euphemism. We got to do it. I'd never even heard of it when I was in the U S but over here, of course we've done that. Um, and so I use that for like very, what I probably consider simpler tasks. And I'm like deep in Claude for like the work and we've, we've got like, this is another thing. It's better. I think as organizations to provide those enterprise plans for like Claude and chat GPT and bite the bullet, because otherwise they're going to be off in their own personal accounts, uploading, you know, confidential documentation and PII and stuff like that. And maybe most of them won't, but the odd person will. And that's a disaster waiting to be happened. So just spend the money, get the enterprise version, make sure your data is safe and contained. That's that's a, it's a quick tip for any sort of people out there who haven't done that yet, because I think the cost of, of bringing that into the business is going to be much more effective than the cost of some of this stuff getting out there. But going back to your question, yeah, chat GPT for some of the easier things, quicker questions, right. Kind of like I used to use Google, um, and Claude for more of the deeper work. And I sort of bounce between depending on what I want to do, like a chat session or like cowork, uh, coworking projects is is like really cool for me. And in the last few weeks, I've, I've moved into Claude code and terminal and Shane, I've got no idea what I'm doing, mate, but I've got, you know, but I'm building stuff. I don't know how I'm doing it, but I'm like, essentially what I'm doing is I have terminal open on the right of my screen and I'll have like Claude chat on the left. And I'm just bouncing between windows telling me this, what do I do now? Copy, copy from, you know, chat into, uh, terminal and it comes back with this and I put it back in and I'm toggling between them and it's not really efficient, but like it's building amazing stuff. And so, you know, it's a whole kind of vibe coding approach. And, and this is the thing I think people forget is, you know, the hundreds of tools, the sort of reticence to start, or I'm unsure where to start because I don't know how to do it properly. Just do that. Just open a window and open like a, a, a, you know, terminal. And just copy, paste, copy, paste, and see what happens. It's pretty amazing when you see the things you can build at pretty, pretty amazing speed.
Speaker 1Yeah. But I think what you just said over there is such a great advice because, I mean, I've been at the receiving end of this as well, where it's like, where do I focus? Is it Claude cowork? Is it, you know, do I, we are also a Google houses on Gemini. Is it, but Hey, there are all these no, no learn, learn notebook LLM because that's really good for this. What about men say, Oh, that sounds like it's cool. Well, don't, don't say that because we're, we're going in the other direction. Now you're broadening. I brought in the third one. Sorry, but check it out. It's pretty good. Yeah. Right. But you're like, they're all these. And, and what was really good for me was at one point, I was like, I'm just going to pick one thing and just do that. Just learn that. And I'm going to take a bit that it's going to be a tool that is going to be around. So that's one of my, one of my criteria. It should, it should feel, pretty confident that it's not going to go away and just put the blinders on and not look at anything else, um, out in the market.
Speaker 3Yeah. I think that's a good, that's honestly a good approach and you might pivot over time, right? You might go back to another one once you sort of hear, you know, word on the grapevine that it's got this incredible capability, but yeah, that's kind of the way I've practiced. It used to be all chat GPT heard, you know, things about Claude doing a lot of amazing stuff for the really deep complex work moved into that world. And that's the world I'm in now. And I'm sort of playing around the edges with Manus at the moment, but, uh, it looks really, really cool and really powerful, but still stuck in Claude and it's doing what I need for now.
Speaker 1Is there anything else that you think the marketing leaders need to have on their radar?
Speaker 3Yeah. I mean, if I go back to the standards and the QA, and I think that's, that's really important to get a handle on that systems thinking. You know, what I've seen happen with AI is, and I kind of talked about this earlier is it's making like individuals more productive, but it's not making organizations more productive. And so you've got individuals creating hundreds of pieces of work, right. That eventually sort of sit in the shared drive somewhere and, and never see the light of day or, or it can be super powerful, but it just sits there and it doesn't feed into like a much bigger context engine or insight sort of engine. And so I that's because I think people are slowly working out how to play around with the large language models, but they haven't then worked out how to sort of integrate that into the sort of organizational workflows to really move the business meaningfully. And so I think, you know, as a leader, you should become much more aware of that sort of systems thinking and the sort of marketing operations side of it. You don't have to be amazing at it, but you should be hiring for people like that. And one particular role that, uh, I've recently hired and, you know, I had a lot of trouble hiring for it in Australia, actually, but there are a dime a dozen in the U S is, go to market engineer. Now people are starting to sort of be a little bit more aware of it in Australia and, you know, no one's really done it before. So you've got to get a little bit creative on like how you find them. But these are like real systems thinkers who understand all the various different data sources, understand the limitations, can work out a solution to stitch it all together, but also have that commercial mindset. So they're not just building a random workflow off over there that is basically the same problem as someone creating content and sticking it on a hard drive. They're building something that has real commercial outcomes. And so hire those people is what I would say. And particularly if you don't feel comfortable in that world, which I think a lot of marketers and a lot of marketing leadership really struggle with, get those good people around you because they will be a massive unlock.
Speaker 1Yeah, a hundred percent. And we were hiring for GTM engineers and it's just, you just, like you said, it's so hard to find talent locally.
Speaker 3Yeah. I went internally and he's a superstar.
Speaker 1Okay. Yeah. Right.
Speaker 3Pulled him out of the rev ops team. The, the rev ops leader wasn't particularly thrilled with that. Um, but you know, um, I was, and no, he's great. And, you know, he sort of came over to the team and people in my team have various different maturity sort of levels of understanding and using AI. But when he came over, you know, we had to prioritize hard because everyone was like, Brad, what? What about this, Brad? What about this? And he ended up like hitting me up on Slack, like three days in saying, mate, can we talk like I've got, like, I've got 50 things people want me to do and I can only do three. And so, um, that's a really good indicator because people are thirsty for people who can build these things.
Speaker 1Yeah. I mean, the last question that I have for you is, uh, are we, are we going to be all losing our jobs? What's, uh, what's your take on that?
Speaker 3Uh, yeah. Wow. I mean, I've got so many different. Opinions on this, you know, worst case scenario that look at like generally, like, you know, at a real macro level, I, I think I have some overall, not to sound the doom clock, but I have some sort of overall concerns on, um, you know, there's this kind of theory about dystopia before utopia sort of thing. And, um, I think that's a real possibility where a lot of desk jobs kind of disappear over time. And I think that's. Because one AI is like better at like the execution and the analysis and all of us. And also humans are inherently selfish and unaware of what they're doing. Right. And so we all sit here and we know that what we're building with AI has a potential to be really disastrous. Right. It also has a potential to be incredible. No, one's really thinking, geez, am I automating myself out of a job here? Because it's like, no, I can be faster or I can do this really cool thing. Right. And so. I think it's human. Nature to sort of behave in that way. And so I think there is one particular pathway where, yeah, a lot of the desk jobs sort of disappear in the next, I don't know, X years, like I wouldn't take a guess because I think people guessing when that happens are always inevitably wrong, um, but yeah, there's a world where that whole desk job thing dissipates and people move more into the frontline world and service industries become much more powerful, but then, you know, how do they survive when. We all become field marketers.
Speaker 1That's what happens.
Speaker 3Well, yeah, exactly. And no one's, no one's got a job anymore. So he pays for those services. So there's a world where that could happen. Look, will it really happen? I don't know. Humans are also pretty smart at like controlling outcomes. Um, even if it takes a big scare to get us there. So that's a big macro view that might scare everyone. I think, um, getting a bit more granular at marketing. Yeah. I think there'll be changes, you know, historically we've said, oh, it'll just change the nature of work, you know, when the dot-com boom. Happened now, I was just getting out of school around then. Um, and so I wasn't sort of super aware of the change in sort of jobs to be done. But as I understand it, that was a pretty dramatic shift, but we were able to sort of pivot with it. But a lot of people lost jobs back then and ultimately were able to reskill. But it was like a new skill. Wasn't sort of something that threatens to kind of like completely take over all the skills and sort of learn on itself and acquire. You skills over time, what I'm mostly concerned about is like the middle management of marketing, if I'm being honest, I think you need the super senior people for the context and the creativity and the fundamentals, right? Like I've been there before. I've seen it all. I can tell you if this is good marketing and if it's gonna cut through and that's sort of real focused on customer needs. Then you got the really junior people who are sort of probably gonna be AI native and growing up in this world and can probably adjust and, um, I think that'll be okay, but it's the sort of people who are sort of relatively middle of their marketing careers that might not feel super comfortable diving into AI just yet might not have all the marketing training and knowledge to lead the team in the next sort of AI enabled marketing era. So I think they're gonna have to learn to my point earlier to do the systems level QA type standards role. And hopefully the sort of senior leadership can teach one of the fundamentals and the creativity. So I think. There'll be job losses. Is it gonna be the same as a dot-com boom? No, I think there'll be more job losses. It'll be worse. It would be worse. Yeah. Yeah. I look, I think so. But like what an awesome, you know, I'm sort of say this to my team all the time, right? Like what an awesome challenge to be faced with. Right. And, uh, we kind of know what's coming. We sort of know the skills required to be successful in the future. This is why I encourage everyone to like get going now, because if you're sort of. Playing around the edges in 12 months, you're going to be so far behind. And so you've just got to get moving and sort of move with the times. And when those inevitable job losses occur within our discipline or, or the job nature of the job changes your best positioned.
Speaker 1You understand the landscape. Cameron, this is, uh, this has been awesome. I have a couple of rapid fire questions before we wrap up. What is one resource? This could be a book, a blog, a podcast. Whatever it is that you've recently come across that has been very fundamental or you, it has a pretty big impact on how you think.
Speaker 3Yeah. You know, this is like, this is something we can't replicate. Sorry, but like my CEO at the, at the, the moment is an amazing resource for this. Like I said, he did the, the, the vibe code or website, but he is constantly over Slack sending us, you know, XS from X sub stack, like things to read. And so I'm just constantly inhaling. Information, um, so yeah, you can't replicate him, but like checkout X, that's where the best thing is in AIR and sub stack is probably the most useful sort of action oriented, um, platform where you can get real insights. If you could give one advice to B2B marketers, what would it be? Stop worrying about your job now. Start worrying about your job in the future. Everyone's so worried about defending what they're currently doing. Like I've got to keep my job. I've got to keep doing. This and we've really forgotten how much it's changed. And so a real appetite for learning and getting on the tools. I, I think, you know, if you're not doing that, you're going to be in a lot of trouble in 12, 18 months.
Speaker 1Tell me about some of the influencers or kind of thought leaders that you follow regularly. You listen to you like, oh, that this guy talks about interesting stuff or girl.
Speaker 3Um, Ali Miller, she's on, she's, um, you know, I think a top, uh, LinkedIn voice for AI. So see, Ali Miller's great. She's on Instagram as well. And she's very accessible. So I would check her out. What are you most excited about right now? I think it's like the unknown, like it really, like I I'm, you know, early in my career, I just did the job right. And came in and collected the paycheck and didn't really care too much about outcomes that is completely flipped now. I don't know if it's cause I'm old, but like, I really care about the work I'm doing now. And I think with AI sort of. Kind of iterating and evolving at the speed it is like, we don't know what's gonna happen next. And so that is like a really exciting, interesting challenge for me to be like, how am I gonna handle, like, what's this gonna look like in 12 to 18 months? How do I solve for now while prepared for the future? You know, can you be excited about something that's gonna be difficult? Probably. So I reckon I, I would, I would, I would say it's that, but you know, if I, if I give you, if I can give you one. One answer that's probably reinforces a lot of what we said. I think it's marketing going back to more thinking, I think since, you know, we talked about the dot com boom, we've got really, it's nothing wrong with it. We got caught up in this optimization, this paid performance marketing, this growth marketing stuff, and, um, super high, highly data driven and like, that's great. It's important. But, you know, take me back to the mad men days, you know, where it's like, where there's real thinking. Real creativity and real discussions being had, we have to do more of that. So, you know, if we do it well, it could be the next golden era of marketing. That'd be really cool.
Speaker 1Cameron, I wanna say thank you for coming on the podcast. It's been an awesome conversation.
Speaker 3Yeah, my, uh, like real pleasure to talk to you as well. I had a lot of fun and yeah, get me back. I'll do it. Done. Done. Deal.
Speaker 1Thanks so much. Cheers. We hope you enjoyed this episode. If you like Apex B2B growth podcast, please share. share it with your B2B friends and subscribe. For weekly insights on B2B growth across APAC, sign up for the XG Weekly newsletter. Link is in the description. And if you'd like to let us know what you think about this episode or in general, the podcast or anything else, you can email us at podcasts at xgrowth.com.au. We read all those emails. APAC's B2B Growth Podcast is produced and edited by Alexander Hipwell and music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.
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