Innovation Over Ice: Possibility Outweighs Anxiety
In our happy hour roundtable with Mark McKenna (CEO at Instapage), Steven Wong (Cofounder and Co-CEO at Ready State), and Mark Wenneker (Founder of Sheet Metal Arts, CCO in Residence at Winter Sun), we touched on the clear benefits and limitations of generative AI. For example, one of the first themes that emerged is that taste is fundamentally human (a barrier to AI making any and all marketing jobs obsolete).
Throughout the conversation, we also dug deep into specific use-cases and didn’t shy away from some of the potential concerns around privacy or in general what we don’t know yet.
Overall there was a consensus that the ability of AI to increase the ease of finding the information you need in a fraction of the time is going to completely transform industries. And consumers and regulators will be forced to find a way to keep up.
Key Theme #2: The possibility outweighs the anxiety.
The clear potential in generative AI is making things more intuitive, more conversational, and easier to find/create. The internet, and subsequently digital marketing, has become a crowded and confusing place. AI has the potential to make finding what you need closer to the experience of asking a very knowledgeable friend for recommendations. While everyone is (mostly) optimistic about the future of AI, it’s also obvious how much we don’t know yet and need to understand in terms of both functionality and privacy. However, at the end of the day, the promised convenience will continue to push the technology forward.
Excerpts from our conversation on February 10
On overall outlook…
Owen
Thinking about the current, future state use cases for AI overall point of view: pessimistic or optimistic? What are your thoughts?
Mark M
I'm very optimistic. There's no doubt about it. I actually think that we've arrived where AI is really being used effectively already. Of course, it's still in its infancy, to say the least, but I'm very optimistic about it. No doubt.
Mark W
I am really optimistic about it. I think it's going to separate the really talented people from the mediocre talent very quickly. I think that's okay. That's a good thing. I think the talent will rise. The creative will always rise. And I think we're going to see it's another tool, just like Photoshop was when it came out. It's a tool. Scary as hell. And we don't know where that tool is going to take us, but either did the cavemen when they were drawing on caves. So I think it's going to be fantastic and have no idea in hell where it's going to go. But excited.
Steven
I was really optimistic last week.
After seeing the Bing and the Bard launches this week, I'm a little less optimistic because they highlighted how little we know, which is a point everyone's making here as well, about how it'll play out. I think the veracity problem and the hallucinations that they're revealing are aspects I was not aware of before. And we'll have to deal with them.
On use-cases and potential…
Owen
Has there been a use case that you feel like you found either to be clever or that you find to be particularly fun or like 'they finally saved this sort of task'. One for me is like being able to write freeform queries for Excel. You just basically ask, like, what's the average... Rather than having to figure out how to craft the specific formula, you can ask it in free form and it'll write the corresponding Excel formula for you.
Mark M
I mean, we sell higher conversion rates based on it at the end of the day. So that's what we end up selling. As a secondary we talk about cost reduction and replacing resources and all that stuff, but really it's higher conversion rates is the key thing that we drive. And as much as we can automate that for people, the better off we are. We have a lot of people that won't even do experimentation right. They just get that first page up and they're done. And then you can kind of come at them of like, well, how about we can set up an experiment for you through automation. And then they're like, okay, yes, I will pay for that type of thing.
Steven
I agree with what Mark McKenna said as well, because we give people the assets and they never run the tests sometimes.
But you guys have all tried buying flowers, right? Have you noticed how hard it is to send flowers to someone?
Why do I have so much choice and is it real choice? Am I really going to get that or are you just going to send something random anyway? And then I choose it and you tell me it's not going to arrive tomorrow, it's going to arrive next week. Choose something else. Why is it so hard? And Bing promises that it can do some of this type of mundane stuff that would be killer for me if I could say, find me a place that's open, that has swings in Daly City or sunshine, get me out of the fog zone.
Mark W
Massive practicality. On a major level.
…
Mark W
Yeah, somebody's going to go, how good the technology is going to be? Will it be able to edit commercials at some point? Who knows?
Mark M
I got to think it's going to. No doubt. I think it'll be able to edit and personalize commercials.
Mark W
Yeah. Here's a spot. So I'm looking for a song, I want it to be sort of like Tyler the Creator vibe. I wanted to talk about trees, this and this, and it comes back and you're like, here's ten pieces of music. Okay, you just got rid of five music companies right there. That's what they do. They search music. There's massive amount of jobs to do that. I think it's going to be industry change. That's what I mean by, like if you're smart and creative, you're going to be like, this job that I'm doing right now has got about a year runway. So I'm going to take what I know about music, and I'm going to angle it towards where I believe it's going to go.
On privacy and concerns…
Owen
Do you have any thoughts or concerns or even considerations around the role that privacy will end up having to play in the usage and deployment of some of these solutions?
If any of you have worked in healthcare, obviously there's a lot of concern around that. If you're trying to leverage and automate things to take burdens off of hospital staff, there's also the concern of how do you keep that private, how do you make sure you can control some of those inputs and avoid that sort of exposure to personal information? Have you had to deal with that? Thought about that? Need to consider that as you've been developing solutions or looked at ones and applications out there?
Steven
We do, we try not to touch PII in fact, we don't touch PII on our own servers. We always work with safe environments on our client side. But I'm not so worried about this generation of AI capturing and collecting data because I think before we even talked about privacy, all of our data was already captured. I'm more curious about how this generation of AI is going to go back and look at the data that's already there and find out things about me that I didn't know.
Like Mark McKenna, well both Marks, were talking about what's happening in the future. And there's a lot of analysis going on and a lot of visioning that's going on. I think it's going to find patterns that regular doctors, let's say, never get access to all of that data. And it's going to say, all right, when you behave like this, this person's going to likely be in this category. And I create a drug to target this category. And is that good? Is that bad? I don't know yet.
…
Mark M
Just to go back to your question on privacy, if you think about death of the cookie that happened this year, I think fine. But who accepts all cookies here? We probably all do. You probably are all accepting all cookies, I would imagine. But I believe in the value of sharing that type of information. Because I get great song recommendations, I get great clothes recommendations. I get all this great stuff because of it. And the findability of the web is terrible, as we talked about at the beginning. You have so many choices, and who has the time. Serve it up, get it better to you. No doubt about it. So I think just to answer your question about privacy, I just think people are going to get over the privacy deal. For me, having been working building digital presences, websites and platforms, for 28 years, like, I'm a believer, no doubt. And I'm probably at the other end of the spectrum on these things compared to, like, my mom who is terrified to put a credit card anywhere near her computer.
But I think people are going to age out of that. So I think this privacy thing is going to be way less than it is now, as I think people see the value of what sharing your information actually can provide you.
Owen
Yeah, I think your point is well taken. If the value exchange is great enough, it's a too strong a force, right. It's just going to happen.