[Kabir Ahuja] And AI agents are right now a hot topic, but I think it goes a lot further than that. I think we will have an agent for our home. We'll have an agent for like, we'll have topical agents that are different than actually a conversational layer. Might not have even have to be the conversational layer, but they will be the best at and trusted at handling pieces of our lives.- Welcome to the BRITE Ideas Podcast, where we discuss how brands build relationships with consumers and society through innovation, technology, and marketing. BRITE Ideas is produced by the Center on Global Brand Leadership at Columbia Business School.- I'm Matthew Quint, director of the Center on Global Brand Leadership.- And I'm JP Kuehlwein. Adjunct faculty here at the School and principal at Uber Brands Consulting.- BRITE Ideas is sponsored by Lexicon Branding, a specialized consulting firm that develops inspiring brand names and brand architectures for both the Fortune 500 and today's innovative startups and Kogan Page. An independent award-winning publisher that delivers best practices and innovative thinking from global experts across every key business subject.[Matthew Quint] Today on the BRITE Ideas Podcast, we are hosting Kabir Ahuja, a senior partner, and Eric Sherman, a knowledge expert both at McKinsey and Company. Both are alumni of Columbia Kabir, Columbia Business School. So, happy to have him on the show. And Eric is an alum of Columbia's strategic communications program, of which I'm a graduate, so it's delightful to have you both. We look forward to discussing things like the relationship between the CMO and CEO and the overall C-suite, how AI is affecting marketing and the unique potential of genAI in the discipline, as well as talent management issues that come with this rapidly changing world landscape. Welcome to the podcast today, Kabir and Eric, thanks again for joining us.[Kabir Ahuja] Thanks for having us. [Eric Sherman] It's great to be here, guys.[Matthew Quint] Great. Well we've given the Columbia connections, but why don't you start off Kabir with a little bit about your personal journey for a short bit leading into your role at McKinsey.[Kabir] Sure. And actually the, the journey started even earlier at Columbia. I was an undergrad at Columbia as well at the engineering school, and I had the fun pleasure of getting, I think a computer science degree and the one of the first people who owned the degrees had concentration in artificial intelligence. So even though it was almost 25 years ago, that was an interesting time to be working on AI. At the same time I was spending my weekends as a DJ in New York City. So, you know, the two, the two halves of of, of New York, maybe,[JP Kuehlwein] Sorry to interrupt, but this is too much. So you had all the chances to get a decent job between being an engineer doing an MBA and being a DJ, and then you decided to become a consultant. How come?[Kabir] Well, the fun part is, well, at the time, I will tell you the story, by the time I was coming off a, a startup and thought, Hey, this job will actually pay me. And, and then over time I realized what I do is basically like being an entrepreneur for the media and advertising world, going and finding new things and building them and then bringing them to big companies. So there's actually a lot of flavor of both the creativity and the business building in my job today, which, you know, but may be not obvious from the outside world. It's usually like the perception is, you know, I, I'll give you my watch, you tell me the time. I think that we've evolved a, a long, long way from that. But I did have a chance to join Google when it was less than a thousand people. That was my offer. And instead I chose to join AT&T Labs, which was very, you know, revered institution. And I worked on, you know, sort of [?] and switch programming. But certainly the economic effects of that was would've been very, very different. Then did new product development at Accenture and then, you know, thought about how do I think about what's new and build the product. I love product. And so I went and did a startup, which was video conferencing that looked a lot like what, you know, we're using now every day, but it was perhaps 15 years too early. There was no market. I ended up selling it for parts and tech. Decided to go to business school to learn something about, you know, the business side of the world. And actually there's a professor there, Cliff Schorer, who was a close mentor of mine who started a company and actually had me, as the first employee while I was a student, build a, build a medical e-commerce provider. And that - I really chopped my teeth on marketing there, like setting up the, you know, Google Alert AdWords, all of the, you know, some direct marketing spend. And I ran that until I graduated B-School and joined McKinsey. And just in case like you, you, you, you doubt the story here. I just wanna show you guys, this is my neural network tattoo, which is on my arm. Just like completely solidified the idea that this is, that this is what I do. But anyway, onto Eric[JP] Eric, this is tough to follow. What's your tattoo?[Eric] Not even, I knew this would happen and I wish you called on me first so I could get out of the way because I can't follow Kabir's story and you hear that path and how do you follow up from that? I'm a consultant at McKinsey in our communications practice. I've been with the firm for just over three years now and feel incredibly lucky to be here. I work with clients every day and help them craft their narrative, engage with both their internal and external stakeholders, and ultimately partner with them as Kabir said, to help drive growth. Prior to McKinsey, I held a variety of in-house communications roles. I started out in TV and film and then moved over into the media and advertising space. So it's been a pretty fun and rewarding journey to date.[Matt] Great, thank you both. Kabir, before we dive into some of these specifics, you know, you spend a lot of time with tech oriented media companies. I know sports firms talking about this, talking with CEOs, CMOs, other leaders in the C-suite and leadership throughout the organizations. Before we dive into the weeds, give us a take on kind of big picture themes going on, like what are, what's the hot button issues that leadership is trying to grasp?[JP] And I dare you not to say AI before the fifth sentence.[Kabir] Well, I'll start then with something that will sound maybe equally trite on the top level, which is uncertainty and change. But there's a real, real version of that, right? So look, I think we start with what's going on in the economy, right? Like it's so fascinating to see how those effects trickle into the way executives work and how the forces they have to react to from investors to consumers. So we see, I think broadly, just to take a half step back, real GDP growth, you know, there's cash out there, you know, especially with a slightly US lens. You know, things actually look pretty good on the core fundamentals, but consumer sentiment is low. And so you have this like big gap in just like the way people feel, to the mechanics, which I think shows up in all kinds of funky ways. But that is definitely, you say, what are people thinking about? That's one. The second is - we just did a whole bunch of research and we, we live in a world of "ands." So like people -- on the consumer lens on this is people seem to think things have stabilized but also really have lots of concerns and they're splurging at the same time as they're trading down, but they're doing it in different categories and they're saving on food but spending on restaurants and they're demanding sustainability but also affordability. And so like there's this world of "ands" you have to deal with as an executive. I think raises lots of real questions about how not just what to do strategically and what you know, how you show up, but also how you operate your business. So that's my attempt to not use AI. And then I'm gonna say AI 'cause I'm on sentence six, which is true. Like what? But it's more than AI because I think AI is code word for, we've all finally realized that data plus advanced analytics and models plus tied to real manifestation in the world has can drive tremendous impact. And now the tools are available to do it in the digital world. Which I think that's actually the big change. It's not just AI, it's at this chain of things with genAI as a conversational interface has truly changed how you can use that tooling which has existed but never really gotten to full, full velocity. And then I think the last piece, I'll just say what, what do I hear a lot about is what does that mean for people? Like what that means for talent, what that means for people in the role of the CMO. Like how do I think about people who can handle the mechanics of acquiring subscribers, but then also radical industry change and how consumers are spending their wallet and potential consolidation and MarTech stacks and and and. So those are the, those are maybe the big forces that, that I, that I deal with on an ongoing constant day in, day out basis.[Matt] That's great Kabir and yes, definitely, you know, November 2022 with ChactGPT coming out crafted that sense of AI availability accessible to non-experts and changed the landscape of people thinking about that.[JP] I'm surprised you didn't mention one item that maybe it's a recency effect for me, but that I, I sense I hear a lot now, which is we need to stop thinking about marketing, CMO, brand, et cetera as separate things. It's all coming together and it's -- brand and company is the same and we need to find ways to somehow manage that, both in terms of the narrative. I think, Eric, you talked about craft the narrative in your introduction, but also in terms of capability and how we split responsibility, is that just in the little marketing community or is that an overall theme when it comes to the boardroom level?[Kabir] It it's a very good point and it is absolutely a theme, but I'll, I'll push back on one thing just on the overall framing of that question, just to be provocative is that you still need people who are good brand marketers, right? You need people who truly understand the soul of a brand and how to bring it into market. Like I was talking the other day with Kofi, who's the CMO of DoorDash and if you hear him speak about the brand and the length of time he's been there and how he imagines how they show up at the Super Bowl, that is someone who just truly knows how to think about brand at a deep level and bring it to the world. Like, and so, you know, I think you still need those disciplines where the friction comes out in today's world and what you are talking about. And we've done, like, we did this as kind of a, a, a research piece into CEO-CMO relationships and exposed like a hornet's nest of different issues. But like, you know, just, you know, one of them to bring it to life is, you know, almost every CEO is like, oh yeah, marketing knows what they should do. Their, their remit is well defined and marketers say only half of them 50% say the same answer. So like, there's a really big gap in what you're responsible for and those gaps create real, you know, issues. The second piece is, you know, what it takes to get something done today because of cycle times because of complexity of motions means that you actually need to tie the brand into the commercial go to market into pricing, which is usually tied into MarTech.'cause there's some personalization, you think about all these people it ties, ties into the, the CDP and like how data gets piped in. That's a very complicated motion. And the gap we're seeing is in the very top executive teams, someone who like full stop actually owns growth the way historically A COO that was a person you go to for anything that's cost and more, but, and delivery. But like there's the, the, the idea of a single threaded growth leader at some point or at least enough clarity that someone can tie those things together in the top level meetings with board exposure with, you know, that's where I think that dynamic that you just called come in, comes into play really sharply,[JP] Well maybe we should be academic here for a second and start with the usual. What do you, from your point of view and as you walk into advising other companies actually understand as the brand when you say, oh, DoorDash, the CMO knows what this brand is all about and so they're really good there. What do you consider the brand?[Kabir] So the brand shows up in a bunch of ways. So the, the most obvious way to answer that is, you know, sentiment towards an overall sentiment towards a company as measured in, in some version of, of affinity, right? And for years has been avidity and affinity and NPS and all of different versions of like I hear and, and recall and unaided recall. And I think what where we're moving to a little bit and what we're working a lot of time just to like preview about what you're gonna hear from us in the next six months to a year is, you know, that the investment balance has gotten out of whack to the lower funnel because it's so easy to measure. And as we go back up towards brand, you know, and we talk about these things like avidity and affinity and, and recall, you know, we are in, we, we actually need to go back to how we think about brand, but bringing into a world of measuring it with the rigor and speed of the lower funnel. And I think that is gonna be a powerful shift and I, I'm curious about what you guys see, but at least for us, that's something that feels really, really deep to us. Like, and, and the combination of companies that really feel like their brand manifests importantly, like, you know, it's not just Warby Parker, it's Glossier, Dollar Shave Club. There are billion dollar companies that really are anchored in brand but do a very good job of of, of measuring, you know, down from top to bottom of funnel. Hoka is another one like that. We just, we look at these brands and say they, they do a, a real interesting motion of how to think about the brand and how to think about measuring it and how they show up, you know, across the entire funnel. And I think that's where I say brand, so what does brand mean? It means all of those things about how you show up to consumers, but also I think the gap is understanding how to, how to think about activating that top with the same level of precision and vigor as the bottom, at least in the past five years.[Matt] Eric, just to be curious, right, given the communications elements that you're taking a lead on at McKinsey, where does brand come into both what you think from the communications perspective, but where communications needs connections into what Kabir just mentioned, which is this broad swath of influences that affect the perception that consumers or other stakeholders have towards brand?[Eric] I think the marketing and communications components are inextricably linked and we talked about this a bit earlier, but it's comes down to the CEO and partnership with the CMO and across the top team really having a crystal clear singular narrative. One that's cross-cutting and connects across stakeholders that very clearly helps articulate and activate their purpose. And I think that's what's most compelling for consumers. They care just as much about what you stand for about as what you sell. And so I think that's a really important consideration as brands look to both articulate and activate their purpose and, and it's a critical component[JP] Building on that. One of the difficulties I see is even if you have that narrative and you say the C-suite is bought into it and everyone's working against it, depending on what company you are, let's say something very, it might be a major component in how the brand manifests itself. So for example, if the product depends a lot that's say on an app, okay, or it might be communications if it depends a lot on social media and conversations going on or Kabir earlier mentioned price is as much part of the brand image. Think of luxury as a key example there as other components, other associations. How have you seen, does it work best to bring somebody who might be classically labeled A CIO or even a CFO into becoming part of brand management? Does that mean the CMO needs to be placed above it and become the chief growth officer? Does it mean you need to train the CIO or the CFO or how does this work best[Eric] From a communications standpoint? You know, I'll say, I'll say two points on that. First is the best organizations they invest in communications as a core capability, communications that's treated as a team sport. So there's a deep bench of leaders from the CEO to the CMO, the CIO, the different archetypes you just mentioned and even external ambassadors to help elevate and amplify a company's growth story. There's a fantastic remark from Richard Davis who is profiled in our CEO Excellence book and he said the holy grail is to have 12 people on a management team who are equal voices and equal storytellers. That means they can speak for the team, for the company and not just for themselves. And so we're seeing communications as a core capability. It's not just a nice to have, it's a must have. And we have research that backs this high performing organizations, they're nearly three times more likely to express their narratives well and demonstrate thought leadership on topics of public interest. So it's a, it's a core ingredient for growth[Kabir] And how to humanize that in in your management teams and leadership teams. Like one of the things we see is CMOs actually starting to demonstrate toolkits that look less like expert based profiles, like deep expertise driven, but we call like unifier. So if you're a growth unifier, actually I don't care what your title is, like, I mean we could argue about titles all day long, right? But what I care about is that you're an executive who actually communicates in the language of the rest of the business and so they can understand why they want you in that conversation about building an app for a consumer.'cause you can actually explain how the consumer is gonna gonna absorb that. Like, and so I'll give you a couple examples. One is, there's one I think a leading hospital chain where the CMO walks around like literally in in, in with a, with a a, a MarTech stack one pager. Because you know that's like how they communicate and how the rest of the business sees them was like, okay, well what do you mean when you say our customers? Well like here are our customers living in CDP, here's all the stuff that comes in about from various parts of the business and what we know about them and how we can talk to them based on where they are in the journey. That's journey, that's operations, that's experience and it's marketing. So I think like the more a CMO can do that -- you have CMOs who take various different roles and I'll give you two examples. One is like, and you've got Vineet Mehra at Chime who also sits on the board of a couple other companies and, and is a DTC entrepreneur himself. So he's sitting there with a experience base that lets him engage with his other executives as a unifier on the topic of growth. Or you've got Jim Mollica at Bose who's like, he's got the e-commerce P&L. And so like, you know, when you think about what he deals with, he has like sort of the operating feel for the business in a way that's, that's very, I mean is truly a brand, brand guy and brand leader, but also has that other toolkit. And I think the more you see profiles like that who are able to act as unifier or truly engage with other executives in that motion, they become valuable. And, and I started with the CEO relationship because that is you, you are given permission as a revenue leader to operate in that way when a CEO-CMO relationship looks like one which creates that room. So it it that that's a critical, you know, necessary but not sufficient part of the equation.[JP] If everyone likes each other and they're all aligned on the narrative, this sounds like it can become natural. And you described some boards where that is the case often, however, measures are ultimately what steers behaviors and you know, the rewards linked to it. Have you found a certain set of measures or certain type of measures, if you tell me it depends on the industry that helps in that alignment process that everyone becomes a growth officer kind of and works against building that brand and conveying that growth narrative as you call it.[Kabir] Yes. But it's not just all about one overarching metric. Like I think one of the things we have to think about is how that manifests for each of the missions that you might be on as you think about getting to that growth metric. So I think the answer is yes and a North Star is incredibly helpful. In fact, a strategic roadmap around growth should have a north star, but breaking it down into business domains and missions that can drive it is really, really important. And that depends on the context, depends on the company. It also depends frankly a little bit on what the, what the operating model that drives it is. And that's why like when we do this for smaller companies, we do maybe like a reverse P&L, we say, what is your P&L gonna look like in three years? What are the four biggest dependencies? Those become the missions. As you get into larger more complicated situations, you might still do some sort of exercise that says we wanna get to this growth, but here's what it takes, here's what the market's happening, here's the truth line. You know, it's truly a little bit more of like a, a transformation to achieve a bold goal and how that breaks down than it is just like, oh yeah, we have one metric that we're all, you know, sort of stuck hands on. Maybe that's a great way to measure it and celebrate, but it's, it's certainly not not enough.[Matt] We have a case study we did with SAP called Run Marketing Like a Business and the CMO at the time was Jonathan Becher who had come into SAP as the CEO of Pilot Aystems via an acquisition, which ties into what you mentioned earlier with a couple of examples, Kabir of a marketing individual who has had P&L, right? Whether CEO role or running e-commerce, something like that. And the value that brings to drive marketing, connecting better with the CEO and overall business goals. JP had mentioned incentives, Jonathan set up with his team, one of the KPIs for marketing was overall sales and software revenue growth, whether it came from a marketing lead or not, right? Saying like our end, like if we don't, and there was categories of how much and how high they hit had to hit on their goals in order to get certain bonuses, right? Actually tying this into that true rewards incentive of the leadership and the marketing team. I wonder if you have examples like that or others where there are these incentive rewards driven metrics that really help both the marketing department but also help marketing get more of a voice throughout the C-suite and board because the board looks at it and says, you get our overall business goals and we want you to be in the room.[Kabir] Yeah. Well if you think about the four types of roles at least that we talked about with CEOs and CMOs when we talk to each other about how they manifest. You've got Salesforce enabler, brand steward, demand capture engine, and then like customer experience ambassador, you think about these are all like, they can be measured actually. And so, you know, I think you can use these tools to sort of create the missions for the, for the business. I love the idea personally of a aligned goal at some high level. It just, it helps create a, a teaming. I do think picking some of these as like this as like the mission for now, like, you know, in some cases, like a brand a a industry comes under attack like, you know, increased competition because of fiber and, and wireless attackers on broadband. Okay, well all of a sudden the focus needs to become on the enablement of the total number of users on a network, right? So like that, that becomes a mission and, and, and it's a mission that requires not just the revenue leader, but for sure it's a way to incent a teaming approach to something that is complicated and existential for the business as a whole. So I think, you know, some, some version of that as an incentive against, you know, top priorities and even within revenue, there's flavors of how you might, you know, what you track versus what's the, what's the mission that we're being, you know, rewarded for the current moment at differential levels certainly is a tool you could use.[Matt] Communications is one of these disciplines that metrics has always been a little more disconnected to. So just while we're on this particular topic, I wondered if there are strategies that you work with at McKinsey to try to craft some analytical elements into the instinctive emotional value of storytelling and narrative.[Eric] We're always trying to capture sentiment and not just be proactive about communications, but really facilitate two-way dialogue with our stakeholders to continuously renew messaging and narrative development over time. I think that's what one of the key things we see that differentiates some of the growth leaders is first they're communicating their narrative early and often. In fact, 80% of growth leaders communicate their successes more than their peers. And so from a share of voice perspective and also from a sentiment analysis perspective, it's continuously renewing and refreshing your narrative to meet your stakeholders where they are. And that's something that is an iterative process where we see a big failure mode is when leaders are staying in fixed positions and they're not evolving their approach alongside marketplace dynamics, as Kabir said, their business model or what their stakeholders want or need most at that given moment in time.[Matt] We've been talking metrics seems a nice flow into sentence six and talking about AI and its hype cycle, which is extremely high,[Kabir] But don't you feel this is like different than the metaverse one? Like I feel like we're a little bit, it's got a little bit more staying power, at least for the moment.[Matt] Two causes for that. One, just as you mentioned 25 years ago you were an undergrad in engineering working on machine learning or AI - [Kabir] Yeah -- Type thing. So the, this is a process that has been going on for a long time. And then two, what I mentioned, which is the continuous user experience ease that has occurred particularly with generative AI.[Kabir] Yeah. Like it fits, it fits into our existing workflows a lot more easily, right? Like they're not, you know, and so it makes adoption easy.[Matt] That's right. Versus some of these other things that have popped up over the last four or five years like blockchain and metaverse in which the concept and some of the tools are available, but the ease of use is still 15, 20 years away. Part of it is because the machine learning elements of AI -- prediction around data sets for some outcome, is this a spam email? Is this customer likely to churn, et cetera -- have been going on already, they are well-known backend elements. Now we are moving on to genAI in which the prediction is about an output of communication, right? Piece of text, a pixel or a line of code. I leave it to you to talk about where you have seen in the last couple of years these genAI impacts take place in business and and what disciplines are from your perspective at McKinsey leading at this point.[Kabir] Yeah, well like we have this, of this really, maybe it's, you know, we've done like 10 more reports since then, but our, you know, our, our flag in the ground on the value of AI, you know, pegged the number in the trillions and you know, when we broke that down as everyone does, right? Well all new technology's gonna change the world a trillion. But, but, but maybe the more interesting relevant parts to this is we did a scatter plot of what's gonna change, you know, you know, magnitude size for, you know, speed. And the top right of that chart is marketing and sales, right? And why? Well, because marketing and sales, it was like tailor made to be disrupted by genAI and you know, that means there will be people by the way who are affected in different ways. In general I think it's a positive, you know, it's, imagine the industrial revolution and how much that changed the reduction of rote work in the physical world. We are basically building now the engines that will reduce rote work and even some creative work in the information world. And marketing happens to be in an area, marketing and sales, where there's a lot of trafficking of information, of using, of data, of personalization, of like, it's a lot, a lot of information flow, a lot of data and, and a huge opportunity. And so I am actually incredibly enthused by the fact that, you know, we're the top right that there's, you know, we said something north of $400 billion annually, you know, and that actually tries like, I mean tracks to like my early experiments. Like I work with a number of companies on their genAI implementations and you know, we're seeing things like, you know, 10 to 20%, you know, on the dollar increases in efficiency of spend using new tooling. It is, it is pretty impressive in short timeframes. And so I think that if I just take a step back and and say what does this mean and what does it mean for marketing sales? I think it means a two speed approach. One is this will transform the world. Do I understand how it will transform me and do I have the right approach? At the same time as experimenting. That's the two speed approach, right? It it's not, it's not one or the other. You, you have to be doing both.[Matt] What are some of the, these examples you talked about of actual, you know, genAI implementations, either ones you've worked on or things you're beginning to see in the field where you are excited by the actual application now?[Kabir] Yeah, so look, things that get me like hyped, right? Like I love how, you know, and we have a couple of partners we work with, so, so you know, but without being overly, you know, sort of detailed but like- creative generation, creative generation that actually speaks in the voice of a brand to a consumer in the way they want to hear it, and the channel they want to hear it, at the time they want to hear it. Incredible progress there. And there's a bunch of providers, Jasper, Moveable Ink like you could go down the list of them. I think that these kind of providers are, it's, it's a necessary part of the future stack, you know, and, and they, they're very good. I see trafficking, like how do I find the right audience and actually put dollars into the right channel? We have a partner called Pixis which does that and what we see is actually the intelligence layer and, and what's coming up there in terms of the ability for marketers to use that in a, you know, sort of almost a conversational way to, to have conversations about how marketing is going is gonna transform how, how an actual agency and marketing works in the world. Maybe a third thing I get really excited about is this sounds like really boring, but for me it's very exciting. It's like the, the mechanics of the flow. Like, you know, taking a, a campaign and actually mechanically progressing it through the entire chain of getting it out into market. How do I not just reduce the time by, by giving more permission to machines to experiment but actually use AI to get the right approval in front of the right person at the right time with the right context so that you know, instead of a two week cycle, I'm down to six hours to getting something out to market. And though maybe there's like, you could probably name 50 more. Those three are, I'm seeing like impact today in market at levels that me are meaningful to the bottom line.[JP] I'm, I'm thinking back of the time where there was all the social social media hype and thinking about the big picture where I wondered, you know, I wonder whether people are just gonna end up staring at this screen and not being able to peel themselves off this thing because there is the famous cliffhanger effect of it's never ending. I remember a talk about, you know, everything else before in nature in humanity had an end, even TV you might remember those times had an end at midnight, it like blanked out, but now there is no end and we learn ever better how to pull people in. With this new AI effect, I feel reminded of that time when I read, literally yesterday, I found this new tool that summarizes the emails for, for me. So I only get three bullet point emails and then I had somebody respond and said, I found a great tool that writes the emails for me. I am looking now for the third one saying, and I found the one to decide for me whether I wanna read it or not. Where is this going to lead or let me show another example. Creatives are getting really excited about the same thing as you Kabir in terms of a generative creative. But on the other hand, more and more people said it's kind of boring because it takes what exists, mashes it up in new ways and then feeds it back to us. Is there at a much higher level a risk of automization of, I don't know what to call it, culture and conversation? Or are we saying no, it's pure productivity you'll use, don't worry, it's gonna be just buddies.[Kabir] I feel like, I feel like you asked like the, the future of the entire world in that question, which I - [JP] you work at McKinsey, I expect nothing less than to tell me about the future of the world -[Kabir] Well, you know, that is a, that is a dangerous game to play. Eric will start and then I will add[Eric] Oh, no pressure. Look, I think, yeah, it's a, it's a ton to unpack in there, but Kabir mentioned one of the 10 reports, or even more than 10, 50 reports that have come out since we planted that flag in the ground and and demonstrated the potential value of AI. And I think JP had a, if we take a step back, look the organization of the future, one of these reports says, and, and I couldn't agree more with it, it's the organization of the future is enabled by genAI but it's still driven by people. So as organizations become more tech enabled and automated, communications, marketing must become much more personalized than human. So undoubtedly genAI helps enrich your approach to marketing and communications, but outsourcing them completely is a surefire way to erode stakeholder trust. And what we see is the best leaders in organizations, they harness the power of AI and they see the full potential of genAI, but it's used as a sparring partner to help facilitate and augment your existing processes. The material that's ultimately produced has to be checked against context and overlaid with the human touch to be most effective. And I think this becomes even more critical as the stakes become higher, the more sensitive the marketing material or communications, the more human intervention is needed. But Kabir, I'd love to, I'd love to get your feedback there.[Kabir] I'm the subscriber to the human in the loop AI as the solution for the short term on on JP's question of like, you know, how do I, because, because really we still need humans in the loop, you know? And I think the second thing which terrifies me as a father to two young boys is this idea that AI is gonna be able to engineer content that will, you know, sort of both, you know, sort of create them to glaze over and just, you know, the constant loop of stimulation that is perfectly tailored but then combined with the echo chamber of we, you know, once you hear something you, you know, the the these sort of like social media, you know, sort of political, geopolitical, all these like social change echo chambers actually playing into that effect. It's a scary world. So I don't have an answer for you on that. I do think that it's gonna continue. I just, I mean there'll be some regulation around it. I mean Europe might lead as, as in, in the past in GDPR, but, but I think it's a, it's a dangerous thing. If I want to really get weird and take my hat off and talk about the future future, which I would describe much more from my, the deep love of technology, product and, and trends as opposed to a McKinsey view on business. It's that we're gonna live in a world of agents and AI agents are right now a hot topic. But I think that goes a lot further than that. I think we will have an agent for our home, we'll have an agent for like, we'll have topical agents that are different than actually a conversational layer might not have even have to be the conversational layer, but they will be the best at and trusted at handling pieces of our lives. And the same analogy applies to businesses. And agents will talk to agents and that is gonna be a fascinating explosion. And I do, I do think over time the human in the loop will go down, but I do, but the practical implication of that is can I as a business actually define what my agent's gonna be, what part of the world it's gonna own and is it defensible? And that is a fascinating five year, 10 year question for, for companies to really sit and debate as they think about AI transforming their current business. What agent will I own in a, in a future full of them?[Matt] So we're talking about AI agents, computers being the management managers potentially of the future or work colleagues of the future. Let's talk a little bit about talent. Given this massive changing landscape, you know, in marketing or other areas, Kabir, given all this change, you know, what are you guys recommending organizations do in terms of, you know, keeping talent, recruiting talent growing and helping their talent learn?[Kabir] It's a great question. It's something that we're wrestling with, but it's funny'cause like it's not just a question for the HR department, right? This is truly like, I think existential topic that every business leader, including marketers should be sitting here, you know, wrestling with on a, on a frequent basis. One, but one thing I'll, I'll just start with is I'm not sure that that's a hundred percent true what you described and the reason why is because there's this like vision that there's like, you know, we've got 10 people today and five are gonna disappear and there's gonna be like a virtual Kabir who can do, you know, that job. I think what's happening more and our, and our analysis supports this in, in, in all the proper nerdy ways, the activity set that people do will change. Because what AI does is automates tasks, not full humans right now. And nor does it have to. And so you can imagine at an information processing frontline level, yeah, maybe that person no is no longer needed. But we, our analysis is all the way up to the CEO, you know, 30% of what A CEO does - it's somewhere in that range - is a automatable by AI. So, you know, I think the question is, is on people, is both a one-to-one replacement, which is how sort of it was framed, which I, I know you were being provocative, but just I'd like to just object to that frame of what's gonna happen but, but in a positive way saying the good news of that is understanding how people's role changes is, it's a key activity. That's one. Number two is training early and thinking about where you redeploy your energy. I'll give you a very specific example here. You know, we're doing a big AI transformation program for one of the, you know, Fortune 10 companies. And the, the way to think about what's happening there is a hundred plus executives actually implementing AI in pilots across the business. And what we've, what we've gone through on the people journey is a a sense of, "Well, what is this thing?" to "No, no this is a tool." Instead of having to go and decide every little, you know, pricing decision, here's two dials you can solve for volume, you can solve for, for ARPU and margin. Like you now have the dials and the AI works with you to go take those dials and translate it into action. And so you save 20% of time, what are you gonna do with your 20% of time? You know, that's a great question to ask a senior executive'cause they probably have a list of things they'd love to do that will improve the business, but they can't get to now. So I think it's a, and then there's like a a third category, you know, besides like understanding activity change and actually, you know, training leaders to operate differently and as an opportunity and that is re-skilling. I think re-skilling is a, is a huge part of it. It's a huge part of marketing, but beyond marketing and in some cases that will require new people in some case that will be people who then have to just go through a journey to apply their skills elsewhere or learn how to use tools in different ways. But I do think that needs to be an active topic of discussion, relatively senior levels.[Matt] But we like to give every guest a chance to talk briefly about a "BRITE idea" that you might have. Things you work on directly or something that's broader in society or business that would help better and further advance and create, you know, better society moving forward in some fashion. So wanted to give each of you a chance to, you know, talk about a sort of BRITE idea, think in your back of your head that you wish or hope will get implemented.[Kabir] The BRITE idea I would that like in the, of the, of the basket, some of which we're working on, some of which are far out, oh, choose a far out one, which is the idea that everything you do is contextualized, right? And so in this world of agents, I do believe that we still have a disconnected view of context that every single person is trying to build as a, I mean you build for yourself, but businesses are trying to build context on you understand where you are in your journey. There's, there are people that are ahead on that, which is like Apple and Amazon, the obvious ones who have lots of reach into different parts of your life. But I would, I wonder, I wonder well sometimes like how to truly think about a contextual layer that exists that you could plug into and it would make any service, you know interaction, built, be able to be personalized but not just with like everyone trying to, you know, get their own data mesh together based on, you know, on some, but just truly what is the contextual layer that we all operate off of? And I, and that's a big, big idea. I think there's probably gonna be attempts for, from some of the big tech players to really bring that to life in the next five years and, and we'll see how much it's open versus not open and what they do with it.[JP] I wonder if it's another tech idea for players to try and protect what you call that total contextualized environment from the other tech players. And it's called privacy in terms of, no, I don't want them to understand me 100% because you know, then I have no individuality anymore at all. But,[Kabir] But, but I agree with you. But at the same time, so we did a bunch of research at the early era of like when, you know, IoT came about and we started to upload stuff and used, you know, cloud and what we found was people claimed at really high levels to value their privacy and the second utility got high enough that just went right out the window. So, you know, if you upload your, your, your photos to Google photos, which I think is a wonderful product, just the analysis on those photos can tell you every single thing about my life. And the same thing for Apple and anyone else who has access to that sort of information. Like they, you can know my income level, where I live, how my family structure is, where I spend my time on the average day, how much, what my health condition is. Like all of it's there. So I think it's a matter of utility trade off. And the question is at the end of that utility trade off, do you know, are there a couple pockets of really deep contextual data that make everything more powerful? And, and I agree there's a second question on top of that, which is who controls it?[Matt] Eric, thoughts on a BRITE idea from your side?[Eric] The BRITE idea is really building on a theme which we discuss quite frequently and it's treating the soft stuff as the hard stuff as a way to reimagine leadership in a period of constant change and disruption. You know, we published a report and it was just fascinating to me and, and I'm curious to get your thoughts here, but we did a state of the organization's report and in the report only 25% of respondents said that they felt their organization's leaders are engaged, passionate, and truly inspiring. And I think when you see a figure like that, it just, it makes you look twice and it makes you have to rethink leadership for the future and for what employees need today. And so I think the BRITE idea is just saying leaders themselves are on their journey of self transformation and there's just incredible opportunity and also urgency to unlock the full potential of your teams and, and leverage your role as a catalyst for growth and renewal.[Matt] The very last thing, Kabir, we ask all our guests is to discuss a favorite brand[Kabir] The brand that actually to me has like one of the deepest resonances is Nintendo. So you know, like, like many people I grew up in grade school, got my first Nintendo and spent hours, but I also had the privilege when I was I think around 10 to go to Japan and my dad I remember took me and bought me a Game Boy and it launched in Japan before the US and I came back to the US and we would sit and hook up our, you know, sort of Game Boys. We got two of them and we'd sit and play and I remember just feeling like it was holding the future and you know, went, went to school and I got to show off this brand new thing. And so Nintendo in my, in my head was not just enjoyment but also product led futurism. Like this is where the future is. And then I tie that to now sitting with my son and playing Switch and sitting on the couch and having our switches and playing Mario Cart and things and it's like the same exact joy, the same exact idea that, you know, gaming can, you know, sort of be a moment of, of happiness, but also like for me it's family and sharing that gaming experience and the fact that that is the same parallel, you know, 40 years apart is, is just mind blowing to me. So it's both the, the technology and the futurism, but in a very practical way. They're not always the, the highest processor power, but it's always about the experience of gaming in a tech forward way with like this, this underlying current for me personally.[Matt[ Alright. Eric, what about you? A favorite brand of yours? I,[Eric] I think of what's aspirational and what creates desire and there's no better brand than in, in my view, Louis Vuitton, which does that. And I'll be honest with you guys, I don't even own much Louis Vuitton at all. I feel maybe a few items, but I just love how they've built the brand all the over time, how they've sustained equity in the brand and how they've kept it at such a premium level. And so more than anything I look at the people behind the brand and that's what, that's what I gravitate to. And so Louis Vuitton and and LVMH and the entire portfolio is what I always keep my eyes on[JP] Kabir, Eric, thanks so much for being on this podcast. It was a pleasure to talk to you.[Kabir] Thank you very much. It was a great conversation.[Eric] Thanks so much for having us.[Voiceover] Please subscribe to BRITE Ideas on your favorite podcast service. We'd like to thank once again our sponsors Lexicon branding and Kogan Page. For more information about the BRITE Ideas Podcast and Columbia Business School Brand Center, please visit briteideas.co