Accenture CMO Jill Kramer talks about how generative AI will enhance, not diminish, the power of marketing: video

Accenture chief marketing and communications officer Jill Kramer talks about generative AI and why some in the industry feel threatened by it.

Transcript

00:00 The reality, I believe, of why something like a technological advancement like Gen AI could

00:07 be unsettling disproportionately to marketers is because if you think about what we do in order

00:13 to be successful, it's a highly participatory craft, right? I think back to my ad agency days,

00:18 you don't want to walk into a client's office and pitch them a great creative idea and have them go,

00:22 "Well, that was their idea." You want them to feel like that was our idea. You are constantly

00:27 giving them credit for the brief and the feedback. It is a very generous craft that we are in,

00:32 but that also can diminish the craft itself. And everybody feels like they could rewrite a headline

00:39 or the copy should be better this way, or I like this visual. And if you are an inclusive marketer

00:44 or communicator, and you really do bring people in the process, very often they're like, "Oh,

00:49 look, I just did that. I'm great at marketing too." So I think that we always live in a space

00:54 where our craft can feel subjective to participants. When you then layer on, "Oh,

01:00 look, a technology can now do your job." And when you read the graphs of what will be impacted the

01:06 most, and if you don't truly understand it, it adds to that devaluation. But if you pause for

01:12 just one second, that's actually not what generative AI does. Generative AI needs a

01:18 corpus to work off of. If the original content is not fabulous, the gen AI curated synopsis

01:25 won't be fabulous. So it is still going to be powered by the original human idea. And something

01:33 like image generation is still going to be affected by a person's ability to recognize

01:38 why one image is better than the other, and how tweaking it a little this way or that way

01:43 is a gift that not all of us have. So I think that it's just goes back to the fact that our

01:49 profession can sometimes be something everybody feels like they can do. I think there's a

01:55 vulnerability that comes with that, and gen AI might just be ticking right on that vulnerable

02:00 spot right now.