AI-native marketing teams: Rethinking roles, skills and structure

For me, the most important principle is that the customer experience continues to come first. If AI makes the experience faster but less trusted, we've not move forward 100%. The future has to be built on the concept of intelligence and trust working together. [music] Hello everybody and welcome to the CIM marketing podcast. And you know today we're going to be looking at the marketing teams of the future. What do they look like? How are they composed in the age of AI and the advance the relentless advance of technology? You know where is human judgment irreplaceable? Where can we use machines? How do we protect this thing that we all love? distinctiveness when execution becomes increasingly automated and is there a risk of over reliance on AI uh and how do we manage that as marketing leaders and we've got a very special guest today who should know all about all of this because it's Mr. Scott Allen. Scott is general manager of global marketing, privacy, and agency management for none other than Microsoft, one of the biggest techs in the world. Scott, it is an honor and a privilege to have you on the show. How are you? >> I'm really good. Thanks for inviting me. I'm a massive fan of the CIM. Uh, and I am very excited to talk to you, Ben. It's an area we've talked about. I love speaking about. So, please stop me if I talk too much, but I've got a lot lot I can can share and hopefully it's useful for the people that are listening. >> Absolutely. [snorts] People come on this show to get that insight and expertise from our guests. So, I think it highly unlikely you'll talk too much. Um, I have done a bit of reading though and I, you know, we've got a advanced copy of the new CIM report into the effect of AI on the sector. Um, it's a fascinating fascinating piece of research. There's lots in there, lots and lots in there. But one perhaps of the most scary uh findings is the amount of people that expect AI to take their jobs. The amount of marketers that expect AI to take their jobs. Particularly prevalent in what you would call the Gen Z, the Zoomer if you like, generation, the 18 to 24 year olds that are already working as part of a marketing team. Um, one in four expect AI to reduce their team size. Only 6% expect the technology to create new roles. Teams are shrinking and respondents don't seem to think these roles are coming back. Is this a trend that's here to stay? >> I understand why young marketeers and frankly all marketeteers anxious. Every major technology shift has sparked fears about jobs, right? And AI is no different in my eyes. For example, like when photography arrived, some people thought painting was finished and it wasn't. When computers came along, many thought office jobs might disappear. History usually shows that technology does change work. Yep, absolutely. But more than it simply eliminated it, it changes it is is my view, right? All these views are my own. Yes, I work for Microsoft, but this is where what I I truly believe. Now, roles do evolve. Old tasks will disappear and for some that's great because some people don't want to do some of the tasks that they're currently doing but I always see new opportunities emerging as old tasks disappear and we have to predict where do we start and where do we stop so I wouldn't dismiss the concern absolutely not I hear it myself but I would also not jump to a fatalistic view that this is just fewer people and bigger machines because that's definitely not the case I the right answer is different development faster learning and more intentional coaching that we're going to have to give as leaders and AI should empower people and organizations not hollow them out. So wrap that up right the concern is not irrational absolutely we should be honest that some tasks will be automated and some companies will look for cost savings absolutely but the answer is not to remove the apprenticeship AI should accelerate learning >> it's interesting you use this word of hollowing out and also another word opportunities you know one of the things that one of the potential futures that we can see is that actually AI in its totality doesn't reduce the totality of jobs you know there are there are plenty of roles sort of higher more creative levels with this as a tool. The problem still exists or there's a potential problem that still exists is that the junior level roles where people cut their teeth will be removed because some of the more routine tasks in marketing will be we know taken over by machines. >> How do we test that? How do we stop that hollowing out of the junior tier given the decline in entry- level opportunities? Some junior tasks will change um without a doubt. Some entry- levelvel work will become more automated without a doubt. That's a real risk. So, we should not pretend it's not happening. It absolutely is. Right? But if we think about jobs as collections of tasks rather than one fixed role, the opportunity becomes clearer in my eyes. Right? AI may take on some of the repetitive or administrative work, but that can free junior marketeers to spend more time on what I would say more exciting stuff like audience understanding, getting your brief better, better creative judgment because judgment from human is always going to need to be there, how they measure, how they do customer tradeoffs, you know, really getting into the the meat of it that needs that human involvement. So, the real message here is the humans and AI are stronger together. You'll hear that a lot. I'm a big believer in that AI absolutely can accelerate work but people still bring context judgment creativity and accountability that makes that work valuable and I think that's really important to understand and there is a role as marketing leaders and employers also that we need to be much more intentional about how roles evolve how I look at it is you can't just go and pull out the job description from three years ago because you're replacing somebody who's left and just expect that job description to be dust off three post it's exactly the same as it was 3 years ago. You've got to rewrite that as responsibilities evolve, role expectations will evolve, the way people learn will evolve. So the answer to me is junior pipeline challenge is not simply hire fewer people. It's more about automate the bottom layer of the work they do. It's redesign the apprenticeship for an AI enabled world and then pair juniors with experienced marketeers so that we can explain to them how to navigate through what is a fundamental change in how marketing is done. >> It's very very interesting isn't it? It's almost down to the organizations to have a rethink to recreate the front end of careers if you like. Yeah. Yeah. >> To enhance this critical thinking to to to develop this idea of audience understanding, critical thinking, all of those human judgments that we seek in marketeteers um and to and to do it quickly. >> Having a junior marketeteer and making them a prompt machine for AI is absolutely missing the point, right? Yes, human and AI together, stronger together, but redesign what the role is of the apprentice alongside or the first jobber alongside what AI can do for them. So don't just recycle those old job descriptions. Start thinking about what type of roles and responsibilities do you want your marketeers to do whether they're entry level coming out of university etc. just got their CIM qualification or there's somebody that's been 10 15 years in role because all of us including myself are changing and adapting. >> Call me an optimist if you will but such a scenario if they were to do what you'd advise would actually enhance the enjoyment and the interest in entry- level marketing wouldn't it? >> That's the point right I think it's like think about what tasks drive you insane every day. What task would you just wish like we talked before in the podcast, right, about how long you take to edit before AI came along and how that's saving you time. Now, that could give you time back to do other things in your job, but we could actually just allow you to to do a bit of thinking, do a bit of ideation, do stuff that you have on that to-do list you never get to because you need to do this today or that mundane thing tomorrow, right? So, I think you're right. you can get rid of some of that to start with and then focus on things that you either don't get to or new ideas that you've just never thought about. And that's why we need levers need to help define what does a role look like if AI comes and plays a role. There's a really interesting table in the report uh which looks at how the sectors uh vary in terms of upskilling staff for this new technology and you know marketing advertising and PR is streets ahead they're miles ahead of any of the other sectors you know if you go down to sort of hospitality and leisure there sort of lagards you know there's you know less than 10% of of their teams are being upskilled to AI so maybe they feel they're going to need it. But marketing, advertising, and PR, the one thing we can say for our industry, we are way out in front when it comes to upskilling existing staff. What's driving that? >> Well, I think the first thing is marketing is close to the customer. Okay, sales is close to customer, but marketing is as well, especially if you're working together. I mean, I'm a massive fan of connected sales and marketing. Actually, the role I have in Microsoft is all about connected sales and marketing. Marketing is close to the customer. It's close to the content. it's close to the performance pressure that you have as a business alongside the sales tunes. So the impact of AI just shows up much more quickly as a result of the role that you're doing. So you see it in things like research planning content workflows doing localization you know I had to do localization with a global team all the time running events running social salary enablement reporting back of how you're performing that makes skilling urgy for me because marketing teams cannot outsource their own transformation it just it just isn't a thing that you can do you can get advice but you can't outsource it so the people who really understand the brand the customer the market and the sales motion needed are the ones that learning how to apply AI well and marketeers are very much at the forefront of that. So for me that's a key driver. AI is not just another tool sitting on the side of the marketing department. It really in my belief is starting to change how work moves from audience insight to campaign execution to sales follow-up really connecting sales and marketing. If we only hire in a small group of AI specialists, we will miss that bigger opportunity in my eyes. So the real unlock for me is helping every marketeteer build enough confidence, judgment and fluidity to use AI in their flow of work rather than just this thing on the side and stay anchored in the fundamentals like customer obsession, measurement, trust, accountable decision- making. So wrap that up. The best marketing organization for me will not be the ones that buy the most of AI or hire a small group of specialists and call it done. It will be they are the ones that teach people how to use AI in the right way with purpose. >> Interesting. Yeah. A focused approach to the technology. Where are the biggest skills gaps do you think at the moment in our sector? >> It's a good question. I get asked it actually quite a lot. And I'd say the biggest gap is not just technical skill. Everyone defaults to AI. It's a technology. We have a technical skill gap. I actually think it's a big thing is still confidence. A lot of people do not lack ability, right? Most people do not lack ability in the roles that they do. They lack clarity. Clarity on where AI is right to use, is safe to use, how best to use it, what does good look like in their own work, how far do they go with it. That can create a fear of getting it wrong. So people go the other way, right? And they go, I'm going to avoid AI altogether or I'm going to use it in a very very shallow way. And shallow is maybe not the right word because that what I mean by that is that just using it to get notes from a a tease meeting that you've been on and a transcript that's what I call a shallow way is you're not you know it's like buying an iPhone at over £1,000 and using 10% of the functionality just doesn't doesn't make sense right so I think the capability gap is really the mix of marketing judgment data confidence responsible use and that concept of change leadership so as AI gets better, the most important human skills may become even more valuable in my eyes. So, this thing that we've got as humans, curiosity, creativity, communication, compassion, courage, right? Machines don't have that like we do. Um, you could argue they don't have any of that, right? Businesses still run on trust. Like customers still want to run on companies that they can trust, have relationships, they need leadership show from those companies and they need those companies to use in their best judgment. So I think AI can support those things but 100% cannot replace them. >> Do you think it's a danger it goes too far the other way that you know organizations you know marketing departments marketing agencies think gosh we've got to get all our teams upskilled on this technology. They focus too much in the technology and they forget some of the fundamentals of marketing that you've cited. You know audience understanding, critical judgment, uh originality, creativity, those sorts of things. they go, you know, they they throw too many of their chips into the technology and not enough onto the human. >> Yeah, it's a it's it's a really good point and there is a risk if AI becomes the subject rather than the enabler and and and actually it does a lot, right? If you think about people talking about AI, they talk about that AI and you're just talking about it as a as a subject rather than what can AI do for me. So the fundamentals still matter like as a human audience understanding positioning brand measurement creativity commercial impact ethics trust it's all there and AI can help you with all of that. It can't replace you for all of that. So if your brief is weak or AI gives you a fast weak answer then you sort of missed a point. If the insight is shallow AI can scale shallow even more and that becomes a problem for how you do your marketing. So I feel that the way people who are coming into AI and how they use it, AI to me is something that raises the floor on the execution but it does not automatically raise the ceiling on marketing and I that's where people getting caught up is that he's just taken everything from bottom to top. The ceiling still set by the human insight craft judgment for me has to be human led not machineled. >> Interesting. Yeah, judgment. I mean, we I I was once told that it's not possible to teach good taste. A female relative of mine who told me, I don't hope she wasn't talking about me. >> I think my kids will probably subscribe that my taste has gone in the wrong direction, but you know, it's each to our own, right? >> Well, you know what? We're going to we're going to be the the deciders, aren't we? As marketers, we're going to be choosing. We're going to be our taste, you know, our preferences are going to be uh the key differentiator between uh you know, our agency here, our department and our opponents, our competitors. You know, how does the D job change when you've got a machine creating the content and you're doing the curation of the content? You know, how do you actually teach teams, teach young marketers this thing called good taste? >> Well, it's interesting. How many times are people listening sat there and gone right I've got to start this project today and it's that blank page and you think gosh where am I going to start and you then put it aside or you go and spend hours thinking about starting something starting is always the hardest bit finishing is a lot easier so for me the day-to-day job becomes less about starting from a blank page and more about making better choices so you become more of a choice person and the blank page can be started with AI if you're push pushing it in the right way and ask it to do the right thing so what's on brand, what feels generic, what will the customer actually care about? That is where people sometimes misunderstand AI. It's not a it's not magic in isolation. It is building on what you ask it to reason over. And that's the important thing is that a lot of that AI is pulling on if you give it the right guard rails and criteria is stuff you've given it. You've given it context how to think about things. you've told it about your company's brands, their objectives, the needs of your customers, the previous work you've done, the previous briefs you've written, all can be used to think about the tone, the standards you want to set, what you're trying to achieve. And that's where AI really can help you when you train it to be part of your workforce, so to speak. So, teaching good taste is not just teaching people to write better prompts. And I think that's what people get hung up on. You know, I hear a lot about there'll be lots of prompt officers moving forward and yeah, you've got to write a good prompt, but it's not about writing better prompts. It's teaching people to brief properly, curate what AI gives back and know when the output is not good enough and question it and keep pushing and use some of that human element to it. So teams need strong examples, clear standards, and they just need to review rituals where they talk about why something works. Like that is built into a culture. Is that working? Why is it working? Is it good? Does that sound like our brand? Will it serve our customer? Will it support our objectives? And why should it or should it not be used? Right? So, there's still a lot of human judgment that's needed there. So, AI gets stronger when it can reason over your brands, your objectives, your previous work, and your customer needs. That's that's my my real belief. >> It's a fair belief. It's a great analysis. A lot of people listening, those who worked on client side will be thinking yes and I need some help with that you know I need my agency I need the tech the developer to show me how to implement this stuff you know to give me the good use cases where I should be using AI and where it's less useful for me how I implement it how I integrate it into my department into my business um the report is quite skeptical about how agencies and tech developers are doing on this side. It's just that actually uh you know what marketing departments are reporting that um uh they're not providing enough support. Is that fair? >> Well, look, in my job title, I have agency manager and that means uh my team is responsible for the top 25 agencies that we use within Microsoft Glob. So, I spent a lot of time on the agency. I was actually yesterday I was uh I was with one of my big agencies and I recognize the tendrum. I absolutely do. But it's more about teams not being abstract about a the AI conversation. So I think the better the agencies and partners can help make it real um is going to be important. So and then talk more in the language of getting stuff done, how to connect your workflows, what data is needed, what governance is needed required, how is value measured, like building all of the criteria and the guard rails in for AI to work effectively for you. And I think that partners, agencies, and and I'm lucky my agencies very much are partnering with us. I'm lucky to go to New York next week and meet some of our other agencies and we're going to talk about AI and what they're doing and how it could help us and what we're doing and how it can help them. So that sort of sharing piece and partners have a huge role to play where how do we use AI to push that bar up. So for me to summarize it the partner conversation has to move from look what AI can do here is the business problem this is the workflow the value of what AI can do and how it will land safely. So start talking in real terms rather than abstract about AI. >> Don't throw every function and every feature of your piece of software at your client. Ask the client what they're doing. What's their business look like? What's their workflow like? And then tell them what your what features will work for them and where they should be deployed. And look, and it's like when our sales teams go, oh, if I go and visit a customer, I spend the first 20 minutes just listening, half an hour just listening to the customer instead of going in and going, hey, we can do so much for you because we can. It's not on the hard pitch. It's like, what are you trying to solve? What are your workflows? What is it a customer issue you got? Is it this? Is it that once you listen, that's when you start talking less abstract about AI and about, right, let me share some examples what we've been doing with other customers, etc., etc. So I think and there's more examples coming out like two years ago or a year and a half ago it was very hard to get how AI is working. Now you can you could just go to the internet and find lots of case studies but also go spend time with peers go and spend time at events go and learn more about some of the great stuff that's been done with AI regardless of whether that's from Microsoft or whether it's from any of the other big AI suppliers. >> Yeah. Interesting. Um, do we need to become more technically proficient in this AI era? You know, we we have a level as marketers, we each have a level of technical proficiency. Does is that going to go higher or is the opposite going to happen that we actually need to become more generalist in our approach? Do you think? >> Yeah, it's a good it's a good debate to have, right? And I think you could apply this to leaders and to to marketeers more more generally, but I'm not sure marketers need to become engineers, right? That's not the point here, but they on the flip side, they can't stay distant from the technology. You got to you got to think about how you don't become like a a level 400 engineer on theirs. But you need to ensure that you've got enough fluency to understand what is possible. Also counter to that, what's risky? What data is involved? Where is human oversight required in this work that AI is going to help you with? Um, and for me, this is about relevance. Marketing leaders like myself should always be evolving, learning, and reinventing themselves. I talk a lot about reinvention. I probably reinvented myself six times in my career, right? Because I'd be totally irrelevant as a marketing leader if I hadn't have. And like reinventing themselves as mark as the market changes, that's really really important. AI is the next reinvention of marketers roles including leaders as far as I'm concerned and it's right in front of us now right so it's not something to watch from the sidelines it is something that leaders and marketers need to learn into and they just need to be curious look at the judgment of how to use it and have enough understanding to make informed decisions about how I use it and importantly how I don't use it >> it's interesting you me mentioned risk there and and approach the way the approach to risk is So, one of the things we've been discussing in this season, this series is this concept of distinctiveness. You know, something that marketers all seek. Um, the generative outputs tend to be based on probability of what they think the audience will like, not creativity. And the result sometimes, I mean, let's be honest here, the result sometimes is that, you know, the output can feel a little bit bland, you know, and undistinctive, the opposite of distinctive. Do we need to encourage our teams to be a little bit more risky, take more creative risks? >> Look, my view is 100% yes, teams should take more creative risks. But like anything like I'm not encouraging every marketer to go and take all these risks that causes damage to your brand. What I'm saying is take creative risks but with discipline. And what I mean is if everyone uses the same tools in the same way, the work will just converge, right? So AI can help explore more roots and and more ways to be creative, but humans still choose the route that is most distinctive, relevant, and responsible and true to the customer. So take some risk about how you can use AI to create stuff for you, but the human will always have the final decision. So wrap that up like AI gives you the route to explore. Humans still decide which route has the meaning. >> Is there still a role for gut instinct do you think in modern marketing? Look, I'm I'm big on gut instinct and I think there is still a place for gut instinct, especially the more experience you get, the gut does tell you a lot. But actually, I probably just reframe that to informed instinct, right? Rather than gut instinct. So the best marketeteers that I've met and I tried to build model myself from this, they build pattern recognition over time by being in the work, right? So spending years in a row or industry or meeting customers or listening to marketing peers, seeing what lands, seeing what fails, understanding the context behind the numbers. That lived experience as a marketeteer really happens. So AI can absolutely surface patterns. It can challenge assumptions that you you've got and can give you more evidence to work with, but it cannot fully replace the judgment that comes from being close to customers, colleagues, partners, and the market over time. And that is really really important to to understand when you're worried about what AI can do. Like so gut instinct 100% still matters when it's earned for experience and tested against evidence. That's going to be the core mandate if you like for the human marketer is the is the judge is that is using the judgment the human judgment when we're trying to describe that role or sort of framed that role to to our colleagues or employees or whatever it may be you know how do we how do we present that how do we say you know this is what we used to talk about hybrid teams as being you know one person at a desk in an office in London say and another person you know working remotely from their home in the Peak District. You know that that that definition of hybrid now is dying out in favor of a team of which is human and some of which is robotic, some of which is digital and some of which is uh flesh and blood, you know. So when we're trying to describe to the flesh and blood part the human beings, our human colleagues, how their core mandate, you know, how are we framing that? Are we saying to them, you are the judge and the jury? You're the per people whose job it is to decide what works. >> We let me talk about the human markets here. The human market here to me moves closer to the strategy to the sense making the accountability. We talked earlier about you're so busy doing these sort of paths down here. You don't get enough time for the strategy the sense making the accountability. AI can help with production right important. It can help with patterns. It can give you speed but people still define what the customer problem is. the promise we're making to those customers, the trust we need to earn, and the trade-offs we're willing to make. So, I think the future is less about whole jobs disappearing and more jobs changing. And if AI takes on more that repetitive load, marketer can spend more time on that judgment, creativity, relationship building, and the choices that shape true customer impact like because the end of the day, don't forget the customer here. The customer is what you need to be closest to and really understand what is it they want from you as a brand and what you're offering to them. So for me the human marketer becomes less of an operator of tasks and more of an ogre of outcomes. And we have a big thing in Microsoft about um outcomes not activity. Don't come and tell me the thousand things you've done. Come and tell me the outcome you've done. If I took a thousand things to do great but don't start with that right. So I AI changes to work. It should not remove the human accountability behind it. >> Interesting accountability. Now there's a word. There is a big theme in this report. It's not a particularly edifying or encouraging theme which is there is a trust deficit uh amongst the public uh our customers uh namely uh in in AI uh to the point where there is some evidence that if people think that output has been produced by AI regardless of its sort of emotional quality that they're much less likely to trust it or or become engaged emotionally in it. Um part of it seems to be about transparency that you know if as marketers we're using this AI we need to somehow communicate that to our customer base to our audience to say look we have used AI for this um and then if we can be transparent about it it can help build integrity you can build build trust if you like. >> Yeah. >> How do you do that? How do you make that calm, that communication to your audience without actually having the opposite effect without you then end up losing trust because people then think, well, goodness me, these people are just using machines to do all their outputs. Why should I believe anything that they're saying? >> It's definitely a fine balance for sure. I would say trust ultimately comes from being clear, consistent, and responsible. That's what customers are looking for, right? You do not need to overexlain every tool in every process. That's, you know, that's too much, right? blah blah blah you do need transparency where AI affects the customer experience how you're using their data how you know decision making or that brand promise that you're given so for example if AI is visible to customers on a website or if AI is being used to contact customers directly which it absolutely is then you need to be open and transparent that that is happening so you should not be hiding that trust customers trust you if you are secure and you put them first, right? And you are treating them like grown-ups and you are not trying to hide things from them. So things should not feel hidden, unclear or like the customer will be surprised if they found out later. So there is a massive role for this concept of trustworthy AI. It has to be grounded in the security, the privacy, the safety and the accountability that you have as an organization to your customer. But it doesn't mean you need to disclose every single time you use AI to produce like content for a website or for an ebook or whatever it might be. So the way I look at it is transparency should not be treated as a defensive disclosure. It's more about if AI is visible to customers or is acting on behalf of you and your company and the brand. Customers will trust you more if they know that you are being open with them. You're secure and you've put their preferences first. >> It's interesting, isn't it? this privacy piece because one thing in the reports is that the the the youngest generation, the youngest adult generation, the Zoomers, are the least likely to want to give you their personal data. So, you know, they're the most nervous about it. Uh they're almost or similar in nervousness to the to the oldest generation, the boomers. um you know we we seek hyperpersonalization and in order to hyperpersonalize our output as marketers we need personal data you know are we any closer to achieve it when achieving that hyperpersonalization when the privacy concerns seem to be going up um is it even something that consumers want do you think >> yeah I again it's a good question right I think are we closer we are closer technically absolutely we are closer technically but the better question for me is whether we are making experiences more useful or just more targeted. >> So customer we got very demanding especially when you you think about the consumer world and the B2B world they never got so much closer together in terms of expectations that we have when I'm doing my day job and when I'm at home with my family I expect the same sort of experience. So customers just want you to be more relevant to them. They want to be easily easily work with you and they want to be able to respect and value you right. So I also want to feel secure and control and clear on how data is being used as a company to my customers. But privacy change is the standard, right? I mean, the way I look at it is just because we can personalize something does not mean we should, right? Customer has to come first. And that means, you're going to hear me keep saying it, security, trust, consent, transparency is the aim of the game here. And we need to build that into the experience, not added afterwards. Because people are choosing brands that they 100% trust. And all those sort of words I just put in there are a key part to that. So for me the future is not creepy personalization going on. It is respectful relevance is how I would put it. Customer first, security first, trust first and always clear about preferences and how you use customers data. >> Very interesting. Let's let's talk a little bit about the Microsoft experience. Let's look inside Microsoft for a moment. Um you've been right at the heart of AI adoption at Microsoft itself. What was the mood like there when it all kicked off this sort of massive paradigm shift? >> Yeah, look, I mean, we we've been on this journey for longer than than others, right? Because we we very much do test our own stuff before it goes anywhere near the market. So, you know, we very much were at the forefront of this a couple of years ago as we worked through what AI was going to mean when it went out to the wider world. So the answer to your question the mood was a mix of excitement probably stuff that people are going through at the moment excitement curiosity and honestly uncertainty as well and that is absolutely normal. So everybody's listening to this who's new to AI is feeling that that's exactly how we felt and we are a company that is very big at the forefront of AI. Meaningful transformation for me creates energy and anxiety at the same time. It doesn't matter what your transformation project is there's always that mix of energy and anxiety. What mattered for me was the company as in Microsoft went top down and made it clear this was an area that we were going to focus on as a group of employees and leaders together and that is a really nice feeling to have. So how can us build the skills? How can us test and learn? Bringing training where needed to to help us get us to fully embrace the fact that we did not know it all and we didn't have all the answers on day one. That's okay. The leadership support has also been super important in this at Microsoft because people need to know their leaders are not standing at the side of the change. They are right in the middle of it backing them to learn. The experimentation is something they encourage and the responsible adoption is there. And that is also the opportunity now for other companies as far as I'm concerned and and marketing leaders. There are more examples, more peers, more lessons to learn than there ever has been before. When we were starting out, we didn't have any blueprint. sort of to go from. So it was a little bit harder. So I would encourage people that are listening, go embrace the learning. Go to events, talk to marketing peers across industries, compare what's working, understand what is not, and bring those lessons back into your own organization. I'm doing that still constantly. I don't just rely on what we're doing internally. I'm often talking to other marketing leaders to learn what they're doing. You don't have to have every art before you start. That was important for us in Microsoft as well. We didn't have every answer, but you do need to create a culture where people feel supported to learn and to try and improve. So our our teams in Microsoft didn't need the hype around AI. They needed to ensure that their worries weren't just brushed aside and that was really important and leaders visibly back in the learning and training and test and learn adoption was important and we did all of that and as a result we didn't just build products that we took to market. We are now actively using AI across all of our different workflows. >> Absolutely. Nice supportive experience, supportive culture. Did you encounter many hurdles and if so, what were the biggest ones that you encountered? >> Well, look, I mean there's we've got a lot of high performing teams across the Microsoft uh ecosystem internally. So, high performing teams can be hard to shift, right? Because their current model is working. So, why would they bring new stuff in? I think the hurdle is not always resistance to AI and and I didn't see it as resistance to AI. It's much more practical. Where do I start? Where do I bring it in? Why would I bring it in? Am I being backed to spend time on this? Is it clear how my role in AI are meant to work together? Will this help me or make my job feel less certain? Those are absolutely fair questions that all of us had or a lot of us had. Um, and leaders were there to answer them with clarity, not slogans. And that's really important that we wasn't, you know, we wasn't playing buzz word bingo on this. So supportive supportive culture comes from how can teams learn, experiment, embrace AI. That was super super important in a way that feels that we can use it in a safe, useful, and a connected way to our work. So I would start with things that can go wrong without damaging the um the customer experience. So pick a workflow or workload that maybe isn't so customerf facing to start with and go try that out. Test AI on internal workflows first. Summarize what you did, how you maybe improved the brief, how you reviewed content better, how you sped up reporting that you're doing or finding patterns in different feedback that you need to give to your your exec. So I would learn there first, build confidence there first and then move closer to the customerf facing work which requires you know much more governance a higher quality bar and much more human o oversight um than stuff that you do more internally. So I think wrap it up. Adoption is not a technology roll out. It's a trust exercise in my eyes. People need to know where to start that their leaders have their back 100%. How AI fits into the role that they're doing. How does it coexist and can they experiment safely? >> Yeah. Interesting that you you sort of you sort of say stop the back office stuff that's not front of house. customer facing and then segue on to >> if you're starting from scratch, start there. If you've already been doing that, start thinking about how you do the more frontfacing stuff because you've got experience and there's the clarity and the employees feel that they're in a place that they can actually do that moving forward. You got to start somewhere, right? >> What's the one piece of advice you would give to those people who do feel that they are lagged, that they're somehow falling behind on this? >> Yeah, look, let me let me get Microsoft to the side here. I've got lots of friends who are in startups or sebased companies. I spend a lot of time with peers at events who are not in the the organization the size of Microsoft. And obviously there's challenges being in a big organization versus a small one. Right? We all have challenges. I think the big advice is probably in a couple folds is start smaller. Like I said, start smaller and closer to the work. Pick pick a real problem that your team is facing every single week that they complain about that. Oh, if only we could do this or if only AI could help us do that. Reviewing content, reporting, briefing, localization, customer insight, campaign setup. Use AI there first, right? Learn from it. Then be really honest about what happened when you did that. Did the pilot actually help you or was it actually a hindrance? Did it reduce time to to do tasks? Did it remove rework? Did it improve quality? Did it create real efficiency? Ask those sort of hard questions. Could it have been better? Was it the right thing to test first? Because you don't necessarily have to carry on. You could stop and move on to something else. And maybe you did start in the wrong place. You have to do that. So the point I'm trying to make is that not every pilot has to be kept alive because AI is attached to it. So do not try to be that AI expert overnight. Become a better marketing leader with better tools and that will give you that strong judgment. So if you are not behind um if you're learning with intent I I do really believe that you're not behind if you want to learn with intent. So start small analyze hard be honest about whether it helps then stop evolve or scale based on the evidence. >> That is a very heartwarming lesson is that you are not falling behind if you are out there determined to learn. If you're determined to learn and you're fed to learn, you are certainly not falling behind. So take that one thing from this show. if you only take one piece of advice. Um, look, when we get past this point, when we get past the learning stage, when we get to a stage, we're always learning, of course. So, when we get to a stage where we are proficient in this stuff, and more to your earlier point, we are using it in the right spaces for the right things. We get to something that is called or is becoming core, this thing of the AI native marketing team. This is where humans and and AIs, humans alike, work together as a close colleague. What does that experience and skill set actually look like? You know, what are its advantages over an all human team? Say >> it's something that people are really starting to think of now if they're moving on to that next phase of AI. And we certainly, you know, are there, you know, on our journey. So for me, an AI native marketing team is not a team where machines are running marketing. Let's be really clear about that. It's a team where AI has just been built naturally into how people understand customers, plan work, create options, measure impact, improve decisions. So they they just become another member of the workforce. And I also think that we need to start imagining a world where members of our teams are not only managing people or projects, they're also managing agents as well. So I can really see and we're going to see this for my team. You know, we just moved into a new financial year. Some of my team who are not managers today will start to manage agents and I mean like five agents, 10 agents and they will start to do work with them and for them like they are a member of the team. Now, that might sound strange at first. It absolutely does if you're not only just starting out on AI, but it's a good thing, right? I think it's a good thing if you have an agent working with you on tasks, probing you on what you are asking it to do, pushing you for clarity, helping you think through the work, that becomes part of how the team operates. So like I can send some stuff to my agent at the end of the day. It will go away and work on some stuff and when I wake up it's got some questions for me and I have to answer the questions and then we're going backwards and forwards like you would if you were talking to a human who needed clarity. Right? So I think that this mindset shift of you can have agents working for you is important because managing an agent is not something to apologize or be scared of. It's one of those next capabilities that modern modern marketing teams will absolutely build and you'll be able to learn from others that have done it how it works. So the future team for me is not humans working machines. It's more it's humans doing more meaningful work with AI and increasingly managing agents as part of that team. Um and I think that's this is not something to fear or apologize for. It's something to embrace especially as a leader and think about how you build that into your operating capability. >> Interesting. Um we're wrapping up. A quick plug to the audience. Again, I do commend this report to you. It is absolutely fascinating. It is based on hard research in more than 2,000 respondents um across the industry. So it's it's it's really serious piece of research from Yuggov. Um it identifies three key priorities. You know, one is protecting the human premium. We talked about that earlier in the show. The second is like making transparency a signal. You know, be open about this stuff. We also discussed that. And the third, right at the top of the show, we discussed which is rebuilding the talent pipeline. You made some suggestions. You know, the way to rebuild your talent pipeline is to change the nature of entry- level jobs. Fundamentally, change the nature of them. Um, is there any other advice beyond those three priorities that you'd like to add by our audience? >> Yeah, I think if people don't listen to this whole interview, this might be a good last question for them to listen to. So, I would say first of all, make AI practical, make it human, and make it trusted. That's the important thing, right? Organizations that win will not be the ones that chase every new AI moment or treat it as a separate technology project or this language models just launched, I need to get it. I mean, language models will become more commodity over time. They will be the teams that really will succeed will be the ones that connect AI to the real customer pro problems and also build it into their workflows. You're going to hear that a lot. build it into your workflow. It's not it's individual side projects that you're you're running, but the governance behind it and make sure you're learning from it and let the AI uh agents learn with you. So, protect the human premium by investing in people. That's my first of the message to to employers. U make transparency a trust signal. Rebuild the talent pipeline by giving your young marketeers new ways to learn and keep the person in control. AI should help people reason, create, decide, act better, not remove the judgment, accountability or care that customers expect from us. And for me, the most important principle is that the customer experience continues to come first. If AI makes experience faster but less trusted, we've not moved forward 100%. The future has to be built on the concept of intelligence and trust working together. That's important. Intelligence that helps us understand our customers, improve work, create better outcomes is really important and trust that gives you the things I've mentioned previously, security, privacy, compliance, transparency and responsible use of customer data. So the AI works more about how when the intelligence is matched by trust, then customers feel that you are operating safely at scale. So, and then finally, keep asking questions. Um, keep learning how AI can play a role and look for guidance from trusted bodies. The CIM is a great trusted body to listen to your leaders, other experts that are out there. Go listen and go learn because to wrap it wrap it up. It would be the opportunity is not to make marketing less human, right? We will talk a lot about humans and machines. It is humans with AI. I will say that to the day I retire with the person still in control using intelligence to create better experiences operating with trust security privacy and compliance at the core. That to me is how marketing becomes faster, more modern and importantly that's where humans will make it matter the most. And I do believe there's an exciting future with AI and human. >> A very positive and interesting and fascinating and heartwarming outlook. That was Scott Allen who is general manager of global marketing, privacy, and agency management at Microsoft. Scott, thanks very much indeed. It's been great to have you on the show. >> Thank you, Ben. I really appreciate you inviting me and I hope that everyone listening takes some value from from what I've said. >> Cheers. [music] Ready [music] to stand out in your industry? Discover CIM membership and unlock exclusive benefits designed [music] to accelerate your career. Gain the professional status and recognition you deserve. Find out more about how CIM can [music] support you at cim.co.uk/membership. The contents and views expressed by individuals in this podcast are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Chartered Institute of Marketing or the companies they work for. [music]