AI Will Automate Content. Humans Will Own Strategy

0:00Hey, it's John Jantz here. I've got a quick question for you. Are you a consultant, agency owner, or fractional CMO who feels like you're reinventing the wheel with every new client or worse, giving away strategy for free? Well, you're not alone. And that's why we created the Fractional CMO Plus Certification. It's a three-day live experience where you'll license the duct tape marketing proven strategy first approach. You'll learn how to turn strategy and strategy engagements into a product. Our next certification is right around the corner. Head on over to dtm.world.certify. That's dtm.world.certify.

0:38And book a call with a live advisor or, heck, you can just chat with our AI advisor too to see if this is a fit for you.

0:55Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantz and my guest today is Peter Benet. He is a marketing leader and strategist with 20 plus years of experience as a CMO for tech scale-ups and startups. He co-founded AI Ready CMO, a platform and newsletter focused on helping marketing leaders adopt AI strategically, not just tool by tool, but through frameworks, case studies and community learning. So guess what we're going to talk about today? AI. Peter, welcome to the show. Welcome. Thanks for inviting me. So given that you and I were just talking off air, you know, I've got 30 plus years, you've got 20 plus years.

1:38How in your mind has, does AI or the advent of AI different than say, websites and social media and search, you know, that kind of came along as tool? Would you say that it's just another flavor or is it fundamentally different? Both, I guess. I had my own agency as well. Jesus. 20 years ago. And it was a social media agency. So at that time it was like, so Facebook business pages just got introduced and everyone was talking about the Clue Train manifesto, markets are conversations and this kind of stuff. Social media, web too. I don't know if you're familiar with the marketer, Brian Solis. Of course you.

2:23Brian's been on the show. Yeah, he was just about talking about the conversational prism. And I don't know. So everyone was talking about like, you know, social media is a thing. And we had this agency, which was a social media agency. But again, that was a new thing. I don't really think that the whole AI, whatever it is right now, is new in a sense of tools and technology for marketers. These are just things that we need to learn and adapt to in a general sense, like we did for, I don't know, Facebook business pages at that time or, I don't know, Squarespace websites. Oh, you can drag and drop websites again now.

3:06That's interesting. Although I think the business model for agencies and marketing teams will be fundamentally changed because of this new AI tool, AI capabilities, AI, whatever, AI. And I think that will be interesting to see. But again, agencies also changed and marketing teams also changed 10, 5, 20 years ago. So I think we just need to be familiar and open to adapt to this new change. So I don't dramatize or strategize or panic around this. You just need to adapt. Yeah, it's funny. There was a period of time where you had social media marketing agencies and digital marketing agencies, right?

3:53It was just like, oh, no, we're this flavor. And now it's just like, no, it's all just marketing, right? So one of the things you write about a lot, and I'm a subscriber to your newsletter, and I really – Thank you. A lot of people out there writing about AI hype, like, look at what this thing can do. But I think you guys have – take a very – like you said, not necessarily a dramatic hype approach, a very almost stand back approach of saying, look, we have to remain strategic. Human beings have a role, but maybe it's changed. And so I really appreciate that take. So let's get in a little bit to the changing, like the AI plus strategy, you know, plus humans approach, because there's certainly a lot of hand wringing right now around all these jobs that are going to be wiped out.

4:39Like what are people going to do? So what do you, let's just divide it. What do you think is going to go away? These tools actually do better than humans. And what do you think is going to actually stay and perhaps not for a long time be replaced by humans or by machines? No, that's a tempting and interesting question. One thing that I want to reflect quickly, the focus on non-hype bullshit and sorry for calling that way, a non-hype framing of this whole entire new trend was also personal choice of ours with the newsletter, but also a strategic choice as well. Obviously, everyone is hyping around this whole thing.

5:20And we are, personally, we are getting a little bit older, I guess. And we are just not interested in the defocusing of our audiences. So we made the conscious decision to kind of like stand still and observe a little bit more with a strategic eye. So that's one thing. Second, to your question, I would love to have an answer, but I'm not afraid to say that I don't know. I think during these times that are changing, it's really hard to know what will happen. And we are just migrating, by the way, the newsletter to another platform, and I had to reread the old stuff that we wrote. When I say old, like half a year ago.

6:07And that will be a context to your answer, by the way. And I just read what we wrote like half a year ago. And everything was so beginning at that stage still. Everything changed so fast within a couple of months. New tools came out, new concepts introduced to the public. And I'm not talking about like agents, like more like, you know, working together with AI, human in the loop and, you know, this kind of stuff. It's so hard to predict because within this small timeframe, everything has changed. I think what we can do to answer this question, and sorry for it, it takes a little bit longer, is that to nail down the basics that we think that it will be changing.

6:51And I think there are a couple of things that will change. And one that I'm almost 100 % sure it will change is that production of marketing materials and like marketing production in a sense, like content production, shall we say, will be either fully automated or it will be not come with a, you know, a high barrier of entry. It's not, it doesn't have a high barrier to enter right now either, but it will have like a minimum barrier of entry with AI. That means a lot for agencies, by the way, for marketing teams, because we create, I mean, like 80 % of our work as marketers or creating content.

7:35Now, if the content creation is almost automated by AI, what do we do, right? That's the question. Now, I don't have the answer, but I'm sure that we won't create that much and that amount of content within our workload and work time. Second, AI is getting perfect or better, shall we say. It's always, you know, tomorrow's AI is 10x better than today's AI, but it's still not perfect. And the reason why it's not perfect is that it still needs the human, us, to course, supervise, review, edit, whatever. So I think the human in the loop or human in the addition working with the AI, it will matter for now, for a couple of years at least.

8:28and third we need to think that if production is not our job anymore but we still need it then where do we need it and i think that's the answer for your question here that we need to be able to form strategies and what is a strategy by the way understanding the client need with empathy and suggest process to achieve their goals. And that's it. Pretty much that's the bare bones, simple strategy. How do we produce more? How do we produce better content? Because production-wise, it will be automated, but it still has to be good. We need taste. We need quality. We need judgment. We need review supervision.

9:18and how do we work better with AI is that if we understand the workflows and the processes as a kind of operator of the entire show. So I think strategy like empathy, taste and operational efficiency or workflow knowledge should be and will be important for marketers. And I'm safe to say these. If you're a consultant, agency owner, or a fractional CMO who feels kind of exhausted from starting from scratch with every new client, well, this is for you. The fractional CMO plus certification is a three-day live experience built to help you stop being the bottleneck and start leading with clarity. You're not only going to learn, you're going to license all of our systems, documented processes, and practical tools all grounded in the duct tape marketing strategy first approach.

10:15We're going to help you turn strategy engagements into a product you could sell over and over again. You'll also get one-on-one support and join a community of marketers who actually get what you're building. Our next certification is coming up soon. You can learn more at dtm.world slash certified. dtm.world slash certified. Well, and I think you raise a real, I think at least right now, one of the differentiators, the barrier to producing quantity is gone. However, I think the barrier to producing quality is still a real differentiator. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And it just, you know, AI just like highlighted how not many of us have taste and how not many of us can produce great content and how most of the content that we've produced so far anyway was, well, I wouldn't say garbage, but like mediocre.

11:15I think it's super important to highlight that previously you needed resources to produce high quality content. So if you wanted to do at a Super Bowl level advertising, you needed DDB or Ogilvy or whoever, big agency. If you wanted to do a global media campaign, you needed a big media agency or an insane marketing budget to, you know, go with that. If you wanted to produce a content library of whatever you have, like, I don't know, 100 e-books or shit, you need 10, 50, whatever, copywriters or marketers to do that. similarly happening in other industries so if you wanted to do I don't know the new John Wick movie you needed a Hollywood studio and so on I can go on and on now you don't need these resources you need a laptop and an idea and I don't know $100 for API credits and pretty much that's it that's all you need and judgment and taste and strategic mindset and, you know, these kind of stuff that are human, innate human values and abilities, which AI cannot produce.

12:40Well, so that begs the question then, if we are going to still have humans involved, do we need different humans? A lot of us. If we built an organization, say, to produce stuff, you know, the copywriters, the graphic designers, that their whole output was the stuff do we now need to hire for taste and for judgment and for brand intuition? I guess yes. I'm not the person who will tell you otherwise and I'm also not the person who is in the business who helps you to do that. But if I would be in the business, I would immediately start some sort of like a training company or anything around that that helps people who have like basic skills through studies like I don't know creative arts or whatever and upgrading them to be able to use those skills in a refined manner or multiple purposes on like in our case marketing so yeah people and companies should hire I think I've actually seen on your website aren't you producing some courses or some master classes or something on those yeah yeah we do some workshops but we are not a training company so So within AI Ready CMO, if you like pay to get a paid member, you obviously have access to some sort of like a workshop training program and some studies.

14:07But we are not a training company. Right, right. Yeah. Okay. And I don't want to be a training company. If somebody was, I don't know, maybe coming out of school now or maybe trying to change careers or something, there are some roles or functions that you would say, hey, you should spend your time up leveling your skills in this area.

14:31So I'm 44. That will be a long shot. Sorry. I'm 44 and many of my friends have kids who are like 15 or 10 or 15. Yep. Or 20 sometimes. And they all talk about the same thing. And I'm like fully honest. They talk about what will these kids will do in 5 to 10 years. What kind of careers they will pursue and so on. You know, they are families. So I usually talk with the dads, obviously, and they are talking about, I need to send my kid to a university or college or whatever. I live in Europe, so I don't know, they send it to Vienna or something. And how should I pick which university they should go in?

15:24How should I help them? And they are clueless. and usually the close to good answer that I see and again this is a personal opinion so treat it as is usually the ones that are sending their kids to some sort of like an art history something around these like soft things which we call soft skills or soft studies whatever yeah I wouldn't send my kid to engineering school right now. I wouldn't send my kid to learn, become a developer or a lawyer or not even a doctor, probably. I don't think that these, I mean, these professions will exist, obviously, but it will have a really huge competition that only the finest one will succeed or will be needed.

16:26But if you have like a general arts degree or something around that, I know usually, you know, treated as totally useless. I have one by the way. But still, so I studied history and sociology. Pretty much useless, I guess, but still. And I think these studies might be something that can be valuable because they teach you the basics of how to read. how to judge aesthetic things and how to think critically. Yes. How to think in context. So like historical context, let's say. And I think these baseline knowledge skills, let's say, I wouldn't call them skills, but these things. It's exposure really more than anything else.

17:18Yes. These will be inherently valuable then. Yeah. Yeah. knowing the latest legal whatever it is yeah yeah which can be yeah queued up how about cmos are you do you see that role going away do you see it you know changing inside of organizations to where it will not only look different but it will have a different function so we we preach at AI Reduce CMO is that the CMO role is becoming more like an orchestrator who is leading and creating these environments of workflows where people work together with AI and AI automation. And from the marketing org chart, like, you know, junior, mid-manager, specialist, head of whatever and C, I do think that the CMO role will be the last one who will fall.

18:15Sorry. Juniors probably will have the hardest time, especially, and also mid-managers and specialists, because some of them need to pivot into something else because AI will just simply eat their field of expertise there. But those people who are able to manage, not just people, but workflows together, so mixing the soft skills with, I wouldn't say engineering level skills of workflow engineering, but more like, you know, operational level. I think these people will be valuable and these people will be the CMOs, I think. But if you were a CMO who, I don't know, only created the marketing budget and delegated the tasks and that's it, yeah, you probably will have a harder time in the upcoming years.

19:09And you need to learn workflow efficiency, operational level execute and you know this kind of stuff or if you are on the other side more like an operational person you probably need to learn a little bit more soft skills and and judgment and taste and you know this kind of stuff that we talked about so far there's a bit of been a bit of a rant for me and i'm curious where you land on this um i think you know a lot of people were jumping at, oh, my AI tool stack is these 17 tools because they all do one thing really well. And I think what I've said all along is I think the Googles and the Microsofts of the world are going to basically figure out how to build all of those best of class tools into their work tool that you buy for one price or that you're already buying that now is just$10 more a month.

19:58And they will really kind of wipe out a lot of these one-off tools. I'm curious what you think of that a hundred per i mean this will be a hard argument because i 100 agree with you i can't share you two examples two examples and one one explanation on why people think that i mean we especially you know c-level people and decision makers they love throwing resources on problems so yeah they have like a tool abandons and they buy shiny new tools every day that's fine, we understand. It's obviously not the right call. And even they know it usually. And the two examples are simple ones. One, you actually mentioned off-air that you read the latest article that we published.

20:48I mean, it's not rocket science, just Claude Kovark came out. A funny thing, by the way, Claude did it. I mean, the Anthropic team did it with Claude code within half, one and a half a week. And no line of code were written by any engineers, all AI. So the learning there is that most of the tools will be irrelevant because startups and AI tools just die every day because new tools will come out. Also, don't forget that the big ones, Google and the others, they have infinite resources. like infinite. They have infinite training data and AI lives on data. So just like one simple AI feature added to Google Ads, let's say, will probably kill 90 % of the AI tools out there right now.

21:50You know, one thing people underestimate, they also have all the hardware. And also the hardware. So it doesn't cost them anything. In a SaaS business, That hardware doesn't really matter that much, more like the data. But yeah, the hardware is important too. And the second thing is that, well, I'm really proud of it because it happened today. So sorry for sharing it with everyone right now on this podcast, but I built a content repurposing application. You literally, it does a simple thing. You give an RSS feed to the application, in our case, our newsletter. we I mean we are only two people so we don't have social media managers and stuff and because most of the content that we do is news driven so every day we publish something new we cannot batch write stuff pre-time so we only know the content on the same day and we need to share it on X and you know everywhere and we spend a lot of time to repurposing this type of content even if we use AI So this app actually takes everything that we have, new posts, and repurpose it on different platforms.

23:06It self-learns. It does everything. Like, it's fully automated. It's amazing. It has a UX, everything. And I built it under an hour while I'm having breakfast at my kitchen table. I'm not kidding. And I don't know how to code at all. Like I never coded a single line of code ever. And I will probably never will. Claude did it. Just why prompting it. So the reason why I'm telling this thing is that it's so easy to build up something new now. Even for personal use that you probably end up. And that's like a wild guess and more like futurism. I might guess that within a year or two, we don't really even have like small sasses for most companies.

23:56People just, you know, ramp up their own applications for their own computer, for their own personal use, for their own agency, for their own clients within an hour. And it works fine just for them. Yeah. So it's interesting. So short answer to your question. I mean, don't really bother subscribing to 20-something AI tools. Probably 95 % of them will be extinct within a year or two and substitute by Gemini or other Google products or whatever. Or second answer, build your own. Yeah, I'm curious. And again, you don't have to answer this. We can end on this. But I suspect that Google will build a coworker clone, you know, because you think of all the people have all of their stuff on Google Drive and not just to be able to say, here, go consume all this.

24:51You've got to believe that that's coming. Peter, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by. Is there someplace you'd invite people to find out more about AI Ready CMO? Well, you just said it, AIReadyCMO.com. It's free to subscribe. we share daily updates daily intelligence every day it lands the one thing that you need to know about AI in marketing in your email box simple it is a newsletter that I read every day I appreciate it Peter thank you hi great well appreciate you stopping by and hopefully maybe one of these days we'll run into you on the road and anytime thank you very much for inviting me

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