Speaker 1One of our biggest challenges as marketers is trying to figure out what's the signal and what's all the noise. And it's no more important in the field of AI. The trouble is, how do you keep up? Welcome back to the CMO Show. Mark Jones is my name. Thanks for joining us for this episode. The CMO Show is brought to you by Impact Institute in partnership with our friends at Adobe. Now, today's quite fun because I was reflecting, we always ask ourselves at events and in podcasts, the compulsory AI question. But what if we had a whole episode that was a compulsory AI question? We're going to look, of course, at AI in marketing. My guest is Cameron Partridge, his chief growth officer at an HCM company here in Australia called Human Force. And what's also interesting that he's worked for a $2 billion company in New York. And he's got incredible experience. He's working with Google and Meta and Microsoft and all these big platform providers, bringing that inspiration and expertise back to Australia. So let's dive in to find out what he's got to say about AI in marketing. Cameron Partridge, thanks so much for joining me on the CMO Show. Thanks for having me. Really excited to be here. I've got to say, I don't know if we've had any actual unicorns on the show before, or at least someone who's worked for a unicorn. So just to kick it off. So to kick it off there, well done.
Speaker 2I appreciate it. Yeah, I mean, it takes many people to sort of get to that status, right? And there was only one small part of a much larger machine. But yeah, really, you know, there's a few more of them in the US and Australia, but hopefully we can change that.
Speaker 1I think so. So the story I'm talking about here is Invisible Technologies, which got up to a valuation of $2 billion or so. And let's start with that story. How did that all come about? An Aussie who went to America, who's boomeranged back to Australia.
Speaker 2I was working in Australia up until about 2016 for, you know, the likes of the big Australian brands, right? Medibank and Telstra and GE Capital, and then jetted off to New York in 2016, thinking it was going to be easy to get a job. Wasn't that easy, I can tell you that. It took me a long, long time. And many, many attempts. And the market over in New York is really that insanely competitive. But look at the end of it, lucky enough to land a job at BBGO and then move to Macquarie Group. And sort of after finishing up at Macquarie, I consulted for, you know, a few months here and there and ended up consulting for like a small startup at the time, which was called Invisible Technologies. And went in on like a four to six week. Short term thing to sort of rebrand the company and I must have been doing something right. And there were enough problems in the business at the time that at the end of that sort of six week contract, they asked me to stay on and, you know, became CMO. And, you know, for those listening, Invisible Technologies is and was at the time, you know, an AI training company. And that means, you know, they're really helping those, you know, those models, those AI models that you use. Every day, ChatGPT, Meta, Google, all of that, where one of the companies that those foundational model providers outsourced a lot of their sort of model building to and model training. And so really exciting, crazy journey, Mark. You know, insane growth, insane growth.
Speaker 1I love a good right person in the right place at the right time kind of story. The training bit is interesting just to pick up on a moment because although we'll get to the. The marketing stuff in a second, the AI training is, I think, a bit of a mystery to most people. It's a bit of a black box kind of process. Give us a bit of an insight into what that is like.
Speaker 2There's kind of pre-training, which is sort of taking stuff that already exists kind of from the Internet and getting the models to learn off that. And then there's the post-training things, which is really refining those models and making sure they're doing exactly what they're meant to do. And these are not just like, you know, the large language models that we sort of use every day and the sort of chat bot type experience. They're also like multimodal things, right, like all the video generators that are out there now and sort of the process of that is typically called RLHF, which is reinforced learning from human feedback, where you sort of go in and you sort of ask a model to perform a task and then it sort of produces that task and a human will provide feedback on that. And it's a really iterative process. It can move from like the most simplest things as in like, is this a picture of a dog, which was what it was like years ago, right now to like extreme specialization and extreme expertise. And you just need a lot of people to do that. And so it's a field that is like really dominated by like gig workers worldwide training these models. And, you know, the ability to win there is really being defined by that expertise now. So really, really cool. It's a space to be in, but like changing so rapidly.
Speaker 1Oh, yeah. So what did you learn from that work, that experience that helped Invisible to take off? What was the sum total of your wisdom in, you know, 20 seconds or less, that's all?
Speaker 220 seconds or less. Wow, mate. It's probably going to take me 20 seconds to think about it. I would say, yeah, don't try to keep up. Don't get distracted by the noise. We see that in marketing all the time. Right? Everything on LinkedIn, everyone's an AI expert. I think the sum total lesson is you're never going to be able to keep up with this technology. So just stay focused. Focus on the fundamentals and do the good things well.
Speaker 1So you're now in Australia at an HCM company. We'll get to that. But I'm interested in the journey as it relates to thinking through brand growth and development. So this is the startup journey, which is creating value in a brand. And you saw that at Invisible through all of these learning experiences you've just been discussing, but I'm sure lots of other experiences too. What was the sort of big aha that you had coming out of that?
Speaker 2Well, I mean, it's really hard to create a brand when you're really, really small and there's a lot of other giants out there. And I think, you know, Gen AI has contributed to that, Mark. I think the biggest problem marketers have right now is that, Gen AI has made marketing much easier to produce, but conversely, made it much harder to win. We've got so distracted over the last 20 years since, like, you know, the dot-com boom and the move to performance marketing and the likes. And I think we just need to get back to the fundamentals. So build for consistency, build for trust. Don't keep changing your messaging. Don't keep changing your channels. Just hold the line, but make sure you do a lot of thinking, you know, at the front end of that to ensure that you're getting the right results. And make sure that it's going to resonate in market.
Speaker 1So rounding back out to the unicorn thing before we move on, what do you think was one of the big contributors to that in terms of the brand growth? The way that you took it from this, you know, seed of a thing with its problems that you referenced up to this glorified status?
Speaker 2Well, look, it wasn't just me, unfortunately. No, I know that. Look, mate. It was a big part of, like, our success was our culture, honestly. We were really hell-bent on hiring the very best people, making it very, very clear that this wasn't the easiest place in the world to work. But if you were willing to sort of roll with the punches, you could do some incredible work. And so that attracted some, like, very special people who wanted to make an impact. And I think the real sort of the real key to our success was just the fact that we were able to do it. And so I think that's one of the things that really unlocked it for us was focus on getting, you know, this is B2B, but, like, focus on getting a few marquee clients, right, where you can, they can really credentialize your brand. And so when you're a small startup and you don't have that, those credentials in marketing, people don't know about you, sort of attaching yourself to another brand that people know and love is a really quick and short process. And so I think that's one
Speaker 1of the things that really unlocked it for us was focus on getting a few marquee clients, right, where
Speaker 2you can, like, credentialize your brand.
Speaker 1AI questions. So I'm really enjoying that. Let's start from the big picture and we'll work our way down. What's your take on the impact AI is having in marketing right now?
Speaker 2Yeah, look, I think I touched on it before, Mark. I think it's easier to produce marketing harder to win, but that's creating a lot of slop, right? And so I think that means a few different things. Get better at creative thinking. Think more before you prompt. That's something a lot of people don't do at the moment. But I really think the big thing is, and it's kind of related to your shiny things, is over the years, we've built up these really complex systems and workflows. And in order to sort of make the most of that and sort of adjust to the speed of change, I think marketing needs to move, keep the fundamentals, but start thinking more in systems and operations. And, you know, I think when you look at marketing, how it's traditionally been done. Most CMOs are probably not prepared for that operating burden, right? Now you take a CMO or a chief growth officer out and you're like, yeah, you're responsible for governance and workflows and standards and QA, you know, they probably go pale, right? And I think that is the world we're sort of moving into alongside. We probably need to own more of revenue. I don't think we've done a really good job of that.
Speaker 1There's a distinction I want to make, which could, I think, help unlock some ideas here. In this conversation, there's consumer AI and there's the large language models that we all use to different extent. And that occupies a lot of the noise, or if you like, is the focus of a lot of, you know, news coverage, if you like. Then you've got the use of AI in marketing tools themselves. And if you like enterprise marketing, what's your take on the distinction between the two? It's anyone, it's easy for anyone working on their own or in a small shop to, you know, get a subscription to one or more of the large language models. It's an entirely different proposition to start redesigning your workflows, to start building out agents in really intelligent ways across an enterprise marketing team, to reinvent the way that you do the work that you do, to go deep on any of the big platform providers. There's a gulf there. And I don't know that that as a distinction is particularly well understood.
Speaker 2Well, yeah, I mean, look, there's so many different ways to think about AI, right? There's the sort of consumer grade stuff that I think most of us use, which you talked about. There's the AI in product. You know, you go to a CRM and they claim to have AI in product. You go to most SaaS providers, they claim to have AI in product. Honestly, they're mostly, you know, these sort of large language models in a wrapper or, you know, some of the, you know, a chat GPT or a in a wrapper. Or there might be sort of these open source models where people can like train them in-house to do a specific thing. So I don't actually think the sort of the distinction is that far apart, right? I do think there are obviously different types of AI as well, right? And this has sort of been around as a concept for 50, 60, 70 years now. But we're mostly obsessed with Gen AI. And I think sort of what we see in products is just that. It's just a variation of those large language models, to be completely honest.
Speaker 1So how is it changing strategy, implementation, the way teams work, though? Because my experience has been that we're still, you mentioned the fundamentals, but we're, but we're really reevaluating how work gets done. And by what or whom?
Speaker 2Yeah, I love this question. I could talk about this for days, Mark. So like, you might have to bear with me on this one. But yeah, like, there's absolutely no doubt that AI is fundamentally changing how we work, right? And business operating models as well. You've only got to look to Silicon Valley and see that there are companies out there worth billions with 20 employees, right? It's obscene. I think the thing to sort of remember is AI doesn't just task, sorry, just doesn't just change tasks, right? It changes like the overall economics of business, speed, cost to serve, margin expansion. And so, you know, our expectations have fundamentally changed. And so the value chain kind of splits, right? From zero or low cost activity in marketing, you know, the repetitive kind of production tasks, all the way through to the, to the, to the premium sort of really strategic and creative thinking. And I think marketing is lucky, mate, because I think you look at other disciplines, sort of, not to sort of poke any holes in finance, but you know, a lot of their workflows are deterministic. It's like this must equal that, right? And, and marketing's lucky in, in itself as a discipline, because there are things that must be true. And like, you know, if it, if this is true, then it must equal that, but there's, which is like a deterministic flow. But there's also this idea of probabilistic, right? Where you need like more thinking and contextual judgment. And I think marketing's really lucky because we get to do both, right? And so the nature of work will change. I think the channel specialists, the single lane owner, where I just do paid search, or I just do email marketing, I think that disappears. And I think the sort of value goes up and we get more generalists doing more strategic thinking, and you've got more systems level thinkers sort of stitching together agentic workflows.
Speaker 1Which gets to the next important point, which is what the thing most marketers think about now, which is how many of us will still have jobs.
Speaker 2Look, uh, I wouldn't want to give you a number. Um, look, honestly, I'm, I'm mostly, there's, there are a lot of things here. I'm, I'm somewhat concerned for junior marketers, right? And, and sort of these sort of channel specialists who've done one thing or learn to do one thing over the sort of early part of their career. If sort of AI takes away what they do, then it creates a problem for marketing in the future, right? Because they're no longer sort of on the tools. They're no longer learning what good marketing looks like. Um, so there's that primary concern. I call it the hollowed out middle, right? Like you've got the really junior ones who are probably going to adjust, but you've got the people who've been doing it for a few years who are now, you know, potentially at risk of like their whole work, life and workflow changing. And in 10 years, who's going to be leading marketing. So I think that'll happen in terms of how many people will lose their jobs. I don't know. I think, you know, we've gone through this before. The nature of work will change. And I think you'll have less people in an organization doing less of the repetitive task stuff, but you'll probably have more people doing actual human thinking. And so overall, maybe 20, 30% of jobs will change. But like I said, the value will go upstream. Um, yeah, I think that's, I think it's, I think it's, um, and I think, you know, I'm just hopeful that sort of the marketers early in their career, um, sort of see that this is happening and, and go into these challenges with like, okay, I can see what's happening now. I need to sort of work across different disciplines and sort of become a marketing generalist.
Speaker 1Tell me about your new company, Human Force, where you've recently started work there. What are the big ideas you brought across? This is obviously HCM. So human capital management. Uh, you've got a bit of a niche in the deskless workers, if I understand correctly.
Speaker 2Yeah, it's, um, yeah, look, man, I got back to Australia. There's multiple reasons why I joined her and I got back to Australia, you know, almost a year ago now. And I wanted a few things. I wanted a very fast operating environment where like outcomes were important. Um, you know, human forces, private equity owned. And so we're going to get that from that sort of environment. The other thing that like, you know, really made me interested in joining, you talked about this deskless focus. Um, that's really important to me. We were just talking about how AI is going to disrupt knowledge work and desk work, right? I think what AI isn't going to replace, at least in this point in time and not for a long time is these frontline workers, right? These shift workers, these contract workers, the real heartbeat of the economy. And I think as AI disrupts, desk workers, it's going to disrupt the economy. And I think as AI disrupts desk workers, more and more people are going to move into that world. And so I think there's a certain level of protection from AI because of that. And also the, the HCM aspect, right? This is not fluffy software as a service that someone can vibe code in like five minutes, right? This is core system of record stuff. And so all of those reasons were, were why I, you know, joined. Um, and honestly, the leadership's amazing, you know, Clayton, the CEO there, and, and he's really driving this sort of AI mindset in that business to the extent that he vibe coded a website over the course of a weekend by, uh, and showed the whole business what's possible. And it's a great website. Um, that's just really cool to have someone who's on the tools, which I think is what marketing leaders have forgotten to do, right? It's like lead from the front.
Speaker 1So I think we are at an interesting point right now where in the, the, the stock market, as you know, recently reacted heavily against SAS platform providers. And, uh, there's a, an idea that, AI agents, either within some of the major hyperscalers or externally in some other platform can challenge the dominance of SaaS platforms. And you mentioned the phrase system of record, by the way. So there is a changing mindset, or at least a traditional mindset that's being challenged by AI around these sort of core software business models. And again, this is all caused by AI. What's your take on that as a marketer, as a brand guy? And it kind of taps into one of the fundamentals around don't change anything about consistency of brand and consistency of message. Things come along like this and suddenly it sort of casts doubt on traditional
Speaker 2narratives. Yeah. I mean, but that's why it's really important to like when you're building out a brand narrative or a brand position, you're sort of not just thinking about now, right? That's the really hard thing about building a brand that lasts is that you've got to somehow think into the future and like think of all the different applications, think of all the different ways this can be disrupted and build your brand in a way that is sort of somewhat consistent, but is flexible enough so that you can pull that consistency through time. Look, as it relates to SaaS, yeah. And it's sort of connected to why I joined Human Force. I think some like, really basic, you know, small subscription, seat-based SaaS is probably in a little bit of trouble. I think the core, really important, like critical business infrastructure, SaaS is pretty safe for now. In fact, I think it's going to be safe for a while. And I think that becomes actually, you know, something to differentiate on, to be honest, because these things are incredibly complex and they need to be built over time.
Speaker 1So the marketing teams, how do you think that's going to change? And if I pick on Microsoft, one of their primary messages is it's humans plus AI. So humans in teams from all departments working with groups of agents that they manage. Is that a mindset you're bringing into how you grow your work?
Speaker 2Yeah, I think so. I think, you know, I think typical marketing teams have done 70% production and execution, 30% thinking. I think this is a real opportunity to really flip that, to be 70% thinking, 30% execution and production. I do really believe humans in the loop are critical to, you know, we just talked about quality. Like in order to sort of win in marketing, quality is the new standard, right? And so I think humans need to stay in that. But I do think agentic workflows, are becoming more and more common. Some people have different definitions of what agentic workflows are. They're meant to be autonomous and sort of, you know, make decisions without too much human intervention. But I do think there'll be more and more shift to the agentic workflows. And I do think that means if they're doing most of the production, probably means a few less people in the organization. I think those workflows move up to a systems and sort of QA layer support. Yeah. And then you've got like really strategic thinkers and outcome owners who sit over the top of that. The sort of one thing I'm actually building for Mark that I think is quite interesting, it goes back to the slop thing. I'm trying to sort of build this kind of independent insights function that's going to work across all of my different teams. I have a growth and, you know, new business team and a customer team and a brand and comms team. And typically they'll sort of work on their own outcomes. I want sort of someone to sit over the top of that, right? And basically get more signal from all the noise because the slop has created noise and the systems that we've built, you know, every marketing technology stack, it's like 500 pieces of technology now. We've got away from real signal and I'm trying to introduce a little bit more capability and a little bit more discernment at the top to decide exactly what's going on. Yeah. Yeah. So that's an
Speaker 1insights analytics decision-making engine of some type. Yeah. Over the
Speaker 2top of like your most senior people. Yeah. Right. It's kind of the person who decides what we do and why, and they have to sort of stand their ground on, I've seen all this information and we're going to go for this and stand behind the decisions. I think that's really important.
Speaker 1What will that do existing tools and platforms can't do?
Speaker 2Uh, because I think they're really siloed at the moment, right? If you go into like a growth marketing function, they're going to be looking at like performance marketing, paid search, maybe a CRO platform, you know, some social stuff. Um, they're going to be looking at that in isolation. Then, you know, in B2B, you might have a customer marketing team. They're going to be looking at CSAT expansion, next best, next best action, right? Brand and communications are going to look at like brand tracking, what's happening, what's going on. Mm-hmm. And I think there's going to be a need for generalists who can move between functions to solve much larger problems. And this kind of insights layer that sits over the top will help with that.
Speaker 1Really what you're talking about is a chief operating officer style role where they, they do in an organizational structural context, have that, you know, oversight of all those different things. So you're saying this is now becoming, uh, an important part of the marketing function, or at least, you know, as it stands from your view?
Speaker 2Yeah. Because I think, and this is sort of the bed we've made ourselves, right? You talked about it earlier, the sort of marketing obsession with like the, the new and shiny. Yeah. And so over the years, we've gone out and acquired hundreds of marketing technology tools. We've gone out and reported on activity, not outcomes, right? Going to the CFO and saying we've got 12,000 impressions, that's not going to work. And I think we've gone and acquired all these systems because we haven't really, we haven't really, truly known how to prove our value and, and attribution is like the sort of flag in the ground that kind of proves that I'm very rarely see anyone who's sort of solved attribution. And so the goal of this is really to sort of simplify a lot of that, right? And bring it back to sort of first principles.
Speaker 1It's interesting if I flick back in my memory, many years ago on the CMO show, we used to talk about innovation as a topic, what it took to be innovative as a marketer. But as I'm listening to you, I'm hearing another reflection of this always on approach to iterating and developing our systems. So there's a, there's a, there's an aspect of our marketing world that is always sort of leaning into the unknown as it relates to what these new technologies can do. So we're holding intention, the basics that we began speaking about, but also. How are we going to possibly reinvent some of these, you know, core executional and strategic issues? So perhaps that's a good way of summarizing the tension that a lot of people are feeling at this moment as professional marketers.
Speaker 2Yeah. I mean, honestly, it's, we've just got to stop overcomplicating things as well. You know, you've, when we talk about innovation, like it's just like getting, look, maybe I'm going to oversimplify. Right. But it's like getting smart people in a room, having a really clear objective and sort of basically unlocking barriers to like really thoughtful processes. Yeah. And so I don't think it's that complicated. Right. And I also think, you know, we see it every day with marketing, like people like, what should we do with SEO today? What should we do with AI summaries? What should we do with large language model advertising? And it's just. They're just different channels, they're different mediums. And if you sort of look at the evolution of, you know, let's say advertising on all these platforms, everyone's worried about like, is ChatGPT going to move into advertising? But it's a, it's a, it's a path that has been, you know, walked many, many times. Right. And so we're getting caught up with this idea of innovation when it's really just adjusting to what's happening. In front of you.
Speaker 1Well, they are in advertising, of course. And, you know, so we know the answer to that one. That's, that's already happening in the States as we speak. And yes, you're quite right. The, the GEO, I think is the, is the term we're all circling around now. So generative engine optimization, which still, as I say it out loud, doesn't quite work for me. But that is also forcing us to rethink a lot of tactical strategies in terms of how do we make sure we get our message out. out there that we get caught up in these engines. So I guess these things are always always going to need to
Speaker 2be top of mind yeah look i um when it comes to sort of different channels or different tactics you know the the geo thing is really interesting obviously like google sort of dominates um in the search world and and you know large language models have come in lately but i don't really subscribe to this idea that like your success should be determined by like any one company like google or meta i kind of think that's like lazy marketing right because it it changes so rapidly these days that you know we talk about seo now and the algorithm changed a few years ago as well we managed to survive that i think we'll survive this as well and you know just stick to the i know i'm sounding like a broken record here mark but like we've just got to stick to the fundamentals you need like a multi-faceted approach to marketing digital is not the only solution despite what we believe um you know fundamentals matter more than just just channels right and so i think like if you go back to them um you're going to be in a really good place rather than getting distracted by like what's new today because what's new today is going to be really old tomorrow i can
Speaker 1tell you that well cameron a really interesting take on how to stay grounded on the basics in in the middle of all of the change and some really great experience too in bridging the the us to australia gap i i know the feeling of coming back to australia by the way you're like you know this is not new york and i think that's a and i think that's okay
Speaker 2i honestly australia is an amazing place right like we're not always at the front of a lot of different things but there's a lot to love about australia and i think from an ai perspective we're getting there camera
Speaker 1partridge thanks for joining us on the cmo show mark
Speaker 2appreciate it good to talk to you you know i love it when
Speaker 1marketers talk about getting back to basics getting away from the shiny stuff um and that's really the dilemma that we've been talking about on the show which is how much of the work we do does it get distracted by trying to figure out where ai is going of course we don't really have an option do we we have to be understanding where all this is going because ai is one of the most transformative technologies that any of us have seen and so i don't know if it's going to be a big deal for us but i think it's going to be a big deal for us don't think that the dilemma is going to go away at all but at the same time we need to remember that as marketers those core fundamentals that cameron spoke about still matter today as much as they ever did so maybe it's one of the things to take away is just how many of the fundamental marketing principles that you know work continue to work in your business what changes do you need to make to bring those things back online so that's it for this episode of the cmo show we'll see you next time as always this program is brought to you by impact institute in partnership with adobe see you next time the cmo show is produced by impact institute in partnership with adobe impact institute is a professional services firm for purpose-led organizations our unique blend of impact consulting brand storytelling and event services help our clients create meaningful change this episode of the cmo show was brought to you by your host mark jones that's me and our producers niall hughes and kirsten babels and our amazing engineer ed cheng and a quick shout out to adobe experience cloud which gives digital businesses everything they need to design and deliver great customer experiences visit business.adobe.com to learn how adobe can help transform your business you
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