Remember your first email marketing campaign? Or maybe you're old enough to remember when "digital marketing" meant updating your GeoCities website? Well, just like those marketers who dismissed email as a fad in the '90s, there are those today who are missing the signs of AI's transformative power in marketing.

Every day, I talk to marketers who are either paralyzed by AI's complexity or, worse, dismissing it as just another overhyped trend. They're making the same mistake marketers made with social media in 2008, mobile in 2010, and video marketing in 2015. The cost of waiting to adapt isn't just falling behind – it's becoming irrelevant.

The challenge isn't just learning AI – it's understanding how we got here and where we're headed. Without this context, marketers risk making costly mistakes, investing in the wrong tools, or missing critical opportunities that could define their careers.

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That's why I'm thrilled to welcome Katie King to the show today. Katie is the author of "AI Strategy for Sales and Marketing" and has been at the forefront of digital transformation for over two decades. She's worked with global brands including Virgin, Samsung, and PwC, helping them navigate the evolution from basic automation to today's AI-powered marketing landscape. As a visiting lecturer at several universities and CEO of AI in Business, Katie brings both historical perspective and practical insights to help us understand where marketing technology has been – and more importantly, where it's going.

The AI Hat Podcast host Mike Allton asked Katie King about:

✨ History Repeats Itself: AI adoption follows familiar patterns seen in previous marketing technology revolutions.

✨ Evolution Not Revolution: Understanding AI's gradual integration helps marketers adapt more effectively.

✨ Future-Proof Foundation: Historical context provides the framework for making better AI implementation decisions.

Learn more about Katie King

Connect with Katie King on LinkedIn

Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode

Your Marketing Career Needs This AI History Lesson

Full Transcript

(lightly edited)

Your Marketing Career Needs This AI History Lesson with Katie King

[00:00:00] Katie King: We know it's here to stay. We know it impacts our everyday productivity. It reshapes industry sectors, and it has a role to play in Marketing, Sales, HR, Legal. So we know it's transformational, but we also know that there is hype and that this isn't being deployed at scale in every industry sector, in every country around the world, so we should take heart from that because we shouldn't let it bulldoze our company decision making, but we can't afford to ignore it. So I think what we can do is number one, we can adopt in different phases. Number two, it's about enhancing, not replacing, but enhancing human efforts. And then I think really importantly, not to get caught up in the technology for the sake of technology, but understanding as marketeers, our job is to satisfy customer needs profitably.

[00:00:58] Mike Allton: Mike's got The Hat, the AI kind, unlocking power in business you'll find, cut through the hype, explore the tech, every week new ideas to check. All Allton leads us on a digital quest, AI secrets. He'll always invest tune in tight. Don't miss a beat knowledge. Groove. Keep you on your feet. Listen up to the AI flow business growth.

Here we go. Cutting edge insights. That's the plan with The AI Hat. You'll understand.

Greetings program. Welcome back to AI and marketing unpacked, right? Selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at keeping up with and integrating or layering artificial intelligence into social media, content, advertising, search, and other areas of digital marketing. And you get to learn to subscribe to be shown I prepare yourself and your brand for this ad revolution and come out ahead.

Remember your first email marketing campaign, or maybe you're old enough to remember when digital marketing meant updating your Geo cities website. Well, just like those marketers who are dismissing emails, a fad in the nineties. There are those today who are missing the signs of AI's transformative power and marketing.

Every day I'm talking to marketers who are either paralyzed by AI's complexity or worse, dismissing it as just another overhyped trend. They're making the same mistake marketers made with social media in 2008, with mobile in 2010, and video marketing in 2015. The cost of waiting to adapt isn't just falling behind, it's becoming irrelevant. The challenge isn't just learning AI. It's understanding how we got here and where we're headed. Without this context, marketers risk making costly mistakes, investing in the wrong tools or missing critical opportunities that could define their careers. And that's why I'm thrilled to welcome Katie King to the show today.

Katie is the author of "AI Strategy for Sales and Marketing" has been at the forefront of digital transformation for over two decades. She's worked with global brands, including Virgin, Samsung, a PwC, helping them navigate the evolution from basic automation to today's AI powered marketing landscape. As a visiting lecturer at several universities and CEO of AI in Business, Katie brings both historical perspective and practical insights to help us understand where marketing technology has been, and more importantly, where it's going.

Hey, Katie, welcome to the show.

[00:03:54] Katie King: Hi, Mike. Thank you so much. Yeah. What a lovely intro. Thank you. Great to be here. Greetings from the UK, everyone.

[00:04:00] Mike Allton: Thank you so much. I appreciate you taking the time. I know it's later over there for you. I appreciate it being in the evening for you, but I want to talk to start about your book.

And you paint this really vivid picture in your book of marketing technology in flip phones, Palm pilots, Microsoft's Clippy. What do you see as some of the most significant shifts between then and now?

[00:04:23] Katie King: Yeah, it's a great place to start because, as you said in your introduction, the pace is so fast, we can't afford, we don't all need to be the major innovators necessarily, and take all of the risks, but we certainly can't afford to be the laggards.

So I've seen huge changes in that time. I started in 1989, and I've been in marketing my whole 35 year career. So there's many. So I would list them within them, the ubiquity of the smartphones, the fact that we've now got, mobile first marketing, so, so important. Understanding where our actual customers or clients are.

The fact that we've had, and this was me going back in the day, being an innovator in social media, before everybody was on board with it, people sitting there really skeptically. say it was going to be a fad. So that kind of explosion, social media, but also influencer marketing as well. I think data driven personalization is another many others, the shift to privacy focused marketing.

But also voice search, voice search and smart home integrations. I think they're some of the big shifts that we've seen since those early days in 2005.

[00:05:43] Mike Allton: Now, a lot of folks listening, I'm going to talk to you for a second because I can, I can relate to where you are if you're skeptical, because I've been in digital marketing since the mid 2000s.

I have literally seen social networks come and go. Blab, Google Plus, technologies that just, some people would hype up. You get a bunch of influencers talking about them nonstop on social media or wherever else that they were talking. And within a few months or years, they'd peter out.

And a lot of folks saw AI that way. They weren't hearing a lot about it until maybe 2022 or even late 2023. Now everybody's talking about it seemingly, although there may be that echo chamber effect going on there. And it's hard for folks to number one, view it differently from so many other things that have gone through that hype cycle in the past.

But number two, it's a shock, I think, to some people to learn that AI has been around for a while. It's, it's been around for longer than just ChatGPT, their major announcement in 2022. Can you walk us through what, what you call the slow build of AI marketing and how do we get from basic automation to what's really sophisticated and happening with today's AI tools?

[00:06:58] Katie King: Yeah, it's a great area to cover, to be honest. So you're right. AI has been around since the 1950s. So we've had 70 years of summers and winters where it goes in and out of vogue. And it's viable now and has been for a few years for two reasons. Number one, we've got the big data. So we've got all the data from the previous iterations from the previous different revolutions of the internet and smartphones and social media that's given us the data and number two, we've got cheaper compute power. So that's why it's viable today, where we've really seen that slow build, we've seen data growth. We've seen that fuel that's been needed to get those accurate models and those experiences, like I said, compute power, advances in all of the algorithms, and then access and adoption, things that then become a bit more user friendly maybe a bit more in terms of the regulation.

So I think I would see the early adoption, where we had rules based automation. Then we started to move into the areas of CRM with data collection and so on. Predictive analytics came after that. And then we started to get the machine learning, which gave us personalization real time data. And then the last two really, which are the biggies, the advanced predictive and prescriptive analytics.

And I think that shift from not having your finger in the air and doing the guesswork to actually being able to predict with confidence and to segment and to almost be the opposite of what people think. People think big sh big, scary robots, depersonalization, but actually this equals. big data, which gives us insight, which actually makes almost superhuman.

So I think those advanced analytics games that are now the kind of end to end AI driven marketing platforms make it a bit more easy to, access these tools. So I think there's some of the main areas that I would see when I wrote book one, people were being told. open up your shopping bag and just buy some AI, I don't care what it does.

Whereas when I wrote book two, and that came out in 2022, and now I'm writing the third book for publication next year, people are much more strategic. So I think we've gone away from that hype of just jumping on the next tool to actually saying this is a A technology and a series of tools and platforms that can really make a difference to what we're trying to achieve strategically and tactically.

[00:09:43] Mike Allton: And I think that perspective is, is really important that your, your point about computing power and use and accessibility of information. These are things that were not possible 10 or 15 years ago with the computers that were popular today. Even, the biggest supercomputers were, just far out.

Beyond what most businesses could afford, the businesses today are talking about, purchasing entire nuclear reactors to power their AI systems. That's not the kind of thing that they were having conversations about.

[00:10:15] Katie King: Absolutely. And probably not the kind of thing they want to be having conversations about now, given, green and sustainability, but yeah, you're absolutely right.

[00:10:24] Mike Allton: But what's interesting to me is that I often talk about how this is the fourth industrial revolution And I'm comparing it to the previous three industrial revolutions The first one which took like a century to get through and each successive industrial revolution has taken less and less time It's just happened at much faster rates of time and yet you talked about in your book how change it seeps Into our lives.

It does not bulldoze its way in, even though I think some of us may feel like AI is bulldozing its way in these days because of that change. How do you think marketers can use that perspective to better adapt to AI?

[00:11:01] Katie King: Yeah, I think it's, it's a mindset. And it's an honest evaluation of what's out there. We know that we can't take the brakes off.

We know it's here to stay. We know it impacts our everyday productivity. It reshapes industry sectors. And it has a role to play in Marketing Sales, HR, Legal. So we know it's transformational, but we ,also know that there is hype and that this isn't being deployed at scale in every industry sector, in every country around the world.

So, and we should take heart from that because we shouldn't let it bulldoze our company decision making. But we can't afford to ignore it. So I think what we can do is number one, we can adopt in different phases. In my second book and on my website, I've got an amazing scorecard for success, where you're giving yourself a score of 0 to 5 across 10 categories.

And you're really trying to ascertain, where are we strong? Where are we weak? What do we need to do? And a few of the big areas within that are, having a business plan, doing things, having proofs of concept, collaborating with other departments. That number one is that adopting phase.

Number two, it's about enhancing, not replacing, but enhancing human efforts. And then I think really importantly, not to get caught up in the technology for the sake of technology, but understanding as marketeers, our job is to satisfy customer needs profitably. So we've got to cut, we've got to prioritize customer experience over the technology. And then all the others fall from that, like testing, being flexible, educating the teams, using it for all kinds of insights. But the last one I'd say as well is we must emphasize the ethics and the transparency. So for me, there's some ways that you can do incremental transformation, rather than it being a major, immediate disruption to what you're trying to achieve, so that the change then permeates through the organization and you're, you're rolling out having some ROI that says, right, this has worked, or this is where we need to iterate that. That's really important.

[00:13:26] Mike Allton: Yeah, I think where a lot of people are coming from, they may not necessarily resonate with me saying that they're being bulldozed by AI. But if I say, they feel like their competition, maybe getting ahead of them.

They feel like maybe they're getting behind in AI, that probably starts to resonate a little bit more. How do you see them keeping humans involved? Cause you mentioned that just a moment ago, having that human in the loop, so to speak. What, what is your take on that?

[00:13:53] Katie King: Yeah, I think it's fundamental. If you think about the use of AI across marketing and sales and CX, we've got to, We've got to retain our clients.

We've got to grow our business. We've got to attract talent. We've got to be able to partner. So we've got to manage our reputation. We've got to be profitable. We've got to differentiate ourselves from competitors. And so we can use various tools to help us achieve that, but we can't jump in and use all of these tools and take them as gospel.

We've got to fact check. We've got to make sure that we layer onto the tools and the outputs that they give us that might be 70 percent accurate initially, a layer of sanity checking, fact checking, contextualization. So I think it's a real mixture of thinking about, for example, chatbots. We might bring a chatbot into our organization.

It might handle 85 percent of routine inquiries, but we need to know that there's a human there that can escalate the more complex ones. We might have tools like Mid Journey, Chat GPT, Jasper, Bard, all kinds of tools that give us that opportunity to save hours and hours of time on creating amazing video, code, text.

But again, we've got to differentiate. We mustn't make mistakes. We mustn't alienate people. We mustn't. So the human in the loop is us using the tools and not imagining all of a sudden, they are the be all and end all, that they are a, they are like copilot the phrase. They are a, a, a new way of working.

They are a new assistant for us. And what I like to think is that we go up the food chain, we have these tools that automate many of the mundane tasks and we become more strategic. So we no longer treat people if we're a bank or a retailer, me, 57, female, we don't treat me as one big homogenous mass of female 50 60.

With my consent to use my data, we say Katie, these are her preferences. These are her habits, et cetera. So we can, we can hyper personalize. We can only do that if we know the right questions to ask. If we know how we can layer onto these tools. the strategy, the context, the fact checking and so on.

Absolutely fundamental. Same in hiring, in HR, same in the legal side. Every business function has got to have that human in the loop to no longer, to not become a faceless organization. And to not make terrible mistakes.

[00:16:47] Mike Allton: Yeah, couldn't agree more. In a previous episode, the conversation was revolving on this idea that we're moving to this point where we'll have a 10 80 10 relationship with, with AI and involvement in most tasks where you know, 10 percent up front, that's the human who's directing the AI, this is what we're going to work on.

80% is taken care of by the A. I. or A. I. Agents working in collaboration to accomplish something. And then that critical 10 percent at the end to make sure that it's valid. It's a good idea to move forward. Whatever the question is, what historical parallels do you see between this adoption of A. I. Today that we're all going through and some of the previous marketing technology revolutions or evolutions?

[00:17:29] Katie King: Yeah, I think all of them. I look back to the internet and the e commerce boom in the 90s and the early 2000s. I look to the evolution of, CRM, and then you touched on some of it in the beginning there, SEO, email marketing, programmatic, mobile, and location based in the early 2010s.

All of them come with, adoption challenges. So how are we going to do this? How can we gradually integrate that? So the A. I. Adoption is making us think about data integration, changing workflows and so on. This idea of becoming much more focused on customer centricity. The previous technologies were starting to move towards that as well.

The idea with S. E. O. And social media of continually learning and adapting. I think we learn from that. And then more of the shift from mass marketing to personalised marketing. I think that's where we are heading. And I think that's a great place to be heading. I think it scares some people that it's a bit creepy, but, what we've got to do is have transparency. We've got to respect people's privacy. We've got to have the balance in the right balance of regulation and, actual innovation as well. So I think just like previous iterations and so on, we've got to have that mindset change and that maintaining the strategic approach, and I think AI is really calling on us to, to, to do that, to keep up to speed with the data and, keep focused on meaningful marketing, customer centric.

So I keep coming back to that definition of marketing, satisfying customer needs profitably. It's not about being the first with the latest AI tool. That's not what we're interested in. We're interested in What are the clients that we're serving? What are their needs? How can we effectively meet and exceed those?

In so doing, how can we differentiate ourselves from the competition? How can we use these tools to be more profitable? And therefore, to be able to offer different price points that stand, make a stand out from the competition. So, yeah, I think that's some of the key points I would make there.

[00:19:55] Mike Allton: That makes a lot of sense.

I know a lot of people are frightened by the capability. They're frightened by whether or not we're even prepared as humans to manage that capability. Zontee Hou from Convince & Convert shared this anecdote in one of our episodes where she talked about how Target had used extensive data from shoppers to create a really interesting personalization campaign at a high level.

That sounds cool. Let's use our data to find out who's purchasing certain products, which would indicate prenatal behavior that would indicate that these people have now identified as pregnant early. Like really early, like in the first trimester before they've told anybody that they're pregnant, right?

So they're not signing up for registries or anything like that And the idea was again makes sense as a marketer. Let's get in front of these people and start to develop the relationship and let them know we've got all these wonderful things at Target that can that can you know? Help you out in your journey over the next eight months The problem was then they use this data This Personal identifying data to create a direct mail campaign that sent flyers in the mail to these expectant mothers.

Before they told anybody that they were pregnant. Shocking, that's so bad. Who in the household looks at these things and like, What? Katie, you're pregnant? You never told me. No, horrible things like that are just so easy to happen. And unfortunately, that has nothing to do with what we're talking about because that's, the humans were in the loop.

[00:21:31] Katie King: But again, it's, if we're saving all this time, it should be freeing us up to to sanity check the things that we do, so, and again, that's where I think involvement with legal and having what I call this like an oversight board or an AI task force, but that's something fundamental, isn't it?

That's a campaign and that's maybe, there are mistakes every year I do. Regularly do webinars and I share the, the great practice, best, best case studies and the worst. And we all learn and we all make mistakes, but yeah, that was a tricky one.

[00:22:04] Mike Allton: Yeah. Yeah. So that's one of the fears. Another fear that I know a lot of marketers have is, am I going to lose my role or what I'm going to do?

Am I going to lose my job? And I know you've written about how marking professionals will seek what the most relief in their daily workload from AI, what tasks, in your opinion, are obsolete now and what new responsibilities are taking their place.

[00:22:24] Katie King: Yeah, good question. Many I think. Predictions come out all the time and reports about this and there's a brilliant World Economic Forum the WEF produces every year, the future of jobs reports.

That's fantastic. If you get a chance to have a look at that, but loads of tasks, manual data entry, list management type tasks, some of the manual lead scoring type of activities, some of the scheduling of, of email campaigns and tracking of campaign metrics. There are now AI tools that can do all of that.

Some of the keyword research and SEO tagging. If you're not investing in some of the tools that help you to do these tasks, then you are falling behind. So I think, what that means is that we all have got new responsibilities. AI marketing has given us, it's shaken up our, our companies, our agencies, but as a job function, because marketing is a job function in all sectors, it's created new responsibilities.

And for me, they include things like. I just touched on, oversight, so compliance, oversight data, privacy, AI model training strategic decision making based on proper insight. So taking away the guesswork and for once actually having genuine insight about all our different segments.

rather than maybe, the banks, the retailers say that in, in many of my case studies, I hear evidence in the House of Lords every month from seven people who come to the all party parliamentary group. So some of these new areas, transparency and ethics, cross functional collaboration, these are new responsibilities.

We didn't have before. They are much, much more strategic. So I think what's happened is we're not executing repetitive tasks. We've become strategic. We make decisions. We are at the right hand side of the CEO. Really helping focus on optimizing the experience of the customer or the client and using data driven insights.

I think that's the biggest difference. And that doesn't mean that young people who come in or people that come in new to an organization at the bottom doesn't mean they're redundant. What it means is all of us are doing slightly different. And actually they might, they might come in, you might say relatively junior, but they may be really intuitive and know all the tools and the barriers to them scaling up the organization.

It shouldn't be tens of years of gray hair and waiting for gravitas. It can happen much more quicker. So I actually think it flattens hierarchies. And makes things much, much more equitable.

[00:25:23] Mike Allton: That's exactly right. I've been giving a lot of talks to colleges and universities lately to marketing students who are just a year or two from joining this crazy new landscape of, of marketing.

And I've been teaching them about how they're going to come into this market with a team of AI assistants competing against other marketers with their teams of AI assistants. And that's why it's imperative to them today to learn how to use. Custom GPTs and personalization of AI, but folks, we're talking with Katie King about the revolution or evolution marketing has and continues to go through with the advent of AI.

And I've got several more questions that you're not going to want to miss, but first a quick word from our sponsor.

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So Katie, I know you've worked with brands around the world.

What are some of the most common mistakes that you see companies making when they're trying to modernize their marketing with AI?

[00:27:13] Katie King: Yeah, again, that spans big brands in all different industry sectors all around the world, from banking and retail and pharmaceuticals. And I think there are many of them.

The most prevalent ones I would say are number one, that they start without a clear strategy or without a purpose. They dive straight in, they get sucked into the hype around the new technology or their might be led by marketing, it might be led by the tech team, we need this. This is fantastic. I read this case study. So I think that's the first I would say.

I think often number two, they underestimate the need for quality data and to be AI ready across the board. I think they often forget the need for transparency, and ethical considerations. And of course, now if you're in Europe, for example, we have the world's first binding law on AI.

It's starting to see more countries around the world. follow that too. I think another would be, we touched on it earlier Mike, is that over reliance on the tech and ignoring the human element, so it might be a, a brand that's using AI across its people function and is forgetting that these are real people that want to join your organization. They don't want to join a faceless organization that's interviewing through bots and doing psychometric testing and AI CV scanning. So I think we've got to make sure we don't ignore that human element. Training, ignoring, privacy overlooking the needs to continuously train and optimize the tools, the algorithms, the teams and so on. The cross functional, I touched upon it in my scorecard, that need to work across different functions. So I've been out in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands with the chief legal counsel of the world's top brands, and they really worry about their teams, for example, their marketing teams inadvertently violating trademarks and copyrights when they're doing their marketing.

So, we've got to make sure that we have that cross functional team collaboration to ensure, we're not making major mistakes. And I think constantly adapting to changing market conditions. The tools now mean we can personalize content that's relevant for different cultures, different languages, different geographies.

And again, we, we might have it saving us hours of time, but then trying to roll that out across the board and forgetting that we need to tailor it. So not fully exploiting, what the tools can give us. So they are some of the main ones that I would point to there, Mike.

[00:30:11] Mike Allton: Those are some great cautionary tales.

In fact, we did a whole episode with Mitch Jackson, an attorney about copyright and IP law. It's critical that agencies today understand the total lack of copyright protection over AI generated work. So please don't create an ebook. using AI and give it to your client that, and they think that they can copyright that material because they cannot.

I know a lot of the folks listening are new to marketing and AI. And in fact, if that's you, this is your first foray into marketing. Yeah, I've got a free AI marketing primer listed in the show notes. You guys got to download that. It'll help you understand all these tools and platforms and where this technology is headed.

But for, for those people, Katie. What lessons can they learn from the past couple decades of digital transformation?

[00:30:59] Katie King: Great question. Let me lay on to that one. One tiny personal response to that, which is not to have imposter syndrome. Don't think that someone they might have somebody in their team like me of a certain age or someone that's got years of experience, whatever it might be.

Don't think that everyone is incredible. There's a lot of people that there's a lot of incompetence at every level, in every industry sector. And just because someone's been doing something for a long, long time doesn't mean that your, your views, your way of doing things isn't valuable, because actually it might be even more valuable because you're hopefully up to speed, and that's number one.

You're starting with a fresh pair of eyes, and what I would say in terms of learning from the last two decades is start with clear objectives. Keep that marketing definition in your mind. This is about how do we How do we tailor our products and services? How do we tailor the way we communicate with people so that we've got a clear objective?

What does success look like? Rather than the technology for the technology's sake. So I think that's important. I think that incremental approach to to it is important that we've touched on as well. Embracing experimentation. What we've got to learn is that we make mistakes. I've got loads of case studies in my books about failures.

Banks, for example, that started by using chatbots. Clients found them gimmicky, because they were really poor, and many of them still are today, and staff were threatened. And then they went away and they iterated, and they ended up using the AI for amazing onboarding of new clients. So this idea of, having incremental changing is and not be, not being frightened of making mistakes.

I think it's really important. You step mind being mindful of the ethics. I keep saying that, the ethics of transparency is really, really important. And thinking that this technology and these tools, this AI is an enabler of creativity, but it doesn't replace it. So again, we learn that from before, staying customer centric all the way through and constantly upskilling what I encourage people to do.

Alongside that scorecard is to have a six month plan and to have things like a watching brief on the competition, a watching brief on AI in your sector, a watching brief on some of the latest tools, going and doing your due diligence and so on. So I think, someone just starting today. We can learn from the past and then we can immerse ourselves in what's happening today, staying up to speed, but keeping, that success criteria at the heart of everything that we're trying to achieve.

[00:33:59] Mike Allton: I love this advice. I particularly appreciate your point about experimentation and exploration of these tools with this conversation with Amy Walters. And she called me out because she talked about the need for just trying some of these things and just, and just playing is really what it was.

And I realized in the midst of that conversation, that's very contrary to my personality. I need to know why I'm doing something. I need to understand the process, the steps and that kind of thing before I will devote. that kind of time. So it's a challenge for me to just jump into a tool like Sora and just play.

That was a real impediment to me 18 months ago. I tried Mid Journey once and didn't really understand the point and I stopped and I could have been so much further ahead in my A I journey. Had I just embraced a little bit of fun, a little bit of play.

[00:34:47] Katie King: Absolutely. It's putting yourself out of your comfort zone. I'm exactly the same. And I keep, at my age, having to force myself to be out of my comfort zone, to keep trying new things, to write the next book, which I didn't really want to have to do, but I'm doing it. We all fall, whatever age we are, into comfort zones.

And again, that's not age related, it's mindset. So have a mindset of curiosity, of experimentation. not recklessness, not wastefulness trying some of these free tools and then making our own mind up.

[00:35:24] Mike Allton: Well in fairness writing a book goes beyond out of a comfort zone, that's actual pain Tears that go into that I know so kudos to you for doing it over and over again to help all of us But I do know that one of the things that I can help people is just understanding, not only the why, but what are the benefits?

And your book goes into several benefits of AI for marketing. And I'm curious, out of the benefits that you've identified, what do you think's evolved the most since you originally published the .

Book?

[00:35:53] Katie King: That's a great question. I think the ones where they've centered around enhanced personalization.

For me, a big wins content creation has been bigger than we ever could have imagined. I think the conversational ones are coming and when they really come fully, it's like some of the agents that are coming, they'll be mind blowing. So I think I'd say customer insights and that ability to really delve down into that some of the visual.

Search optimization to, sentiment analysis. I think what is that you have an AI brain now in loads of the tools that we all got used to using, whether it's Brandwatch or Jasper or Hootsuite or, so we've had all these digital tools at our disposal for years. Over the last 4, 5, 6 years, we've seen them get even better because AI has supercharged them.

So I think for me, some of those are the, the real time customer journey mapping kind of ones, and the chat bots. And I think the chat bots are so good, but not everybody's investing in the latest ones. We've got a bigger bit of legacy there where the old ones are still in place. And we just need a bit of bigger investment by quite a lot of utility companies and retailers and telecoms companies to start using the better ones.

So I think they'd be the ones that I see, those that kind of improve our customer experience and empower you as a marketer or us as marketers to work, really efficiently. A simple one like Otter. When I wrote my first book in 2019. Otter was terrible at transcribing when I wrote the second book two years later it was so much more accurate.

So I think loads of the tools have just improved or if they haven't they've been replaced by something better.

[00:37:53] Mike Allton: Yeah I couldn't agree more. Speaking of tools, I'm using Chat GPT. I'm using Claude and read transparently, Claude helps me write the, the show notes and the preparation for these interviews.

And I tell people all the times it writes the intro and the questions and that sort of thing. And I often joke because Claude is always asking me to ask the guest, AI happening in the next. And I laugh because that's usually a pretty ridiculous question. But I think today talking to you in this context of someone who really understands and appreciates where we've come from historically with this technology, it's a little bit of a safer question because I think we can look back, or you can look back over this historical pattern of marketing technology adoption, and perhaps make a prediction of where you see AI going in the next five years.

[00:38:43] Katie King: Yeah. It's really hard. And I'll tell you for why, because, we never, we didn't predict the real impact that generative and I'm going back to 2015, 2016, when I was getting involved, we don't really, we can't really predict what's coming, but I can see something, some, some shifts.

And I think it sometimes takes longer than we realize. So I do think that some of the use of AI is our sort of strategic partner. To do really hyper personalization is going to be huge, to do the great content to, to move to really proactive marketing. I think some of those sorts of areas are going to be, they don't sound very sexy, but they're actually really, really important.

I think, where the agents. come into our world, and the agents that are there now and are going to be improved in 2025, I think they are going to really help us with, creative collaboration, idea generation, apparently they'll be able to reason, they'll be able to really make a difference.

So I do think that some of that AI powered creative collaboration and idea generation will be like having a marketing assistant with us. I think that's going to be important. Yeah, beyond that, loads of things, the monitoring, the journey mapping, all of that will improve. So I think there'll be quite a lot of things that we've been talking about for a few years.

Really will come into our world. But I think working alongside the digital marketing agents for me will be game changing and maybe some of the sort of changes to voice activation again. I don't know what the device will be, much more ambient voice I think is going to be really, really important.

Maybe some of the digital humans that we're going to see. So I think they would be some of the. important ones that you've got seamless human AI collaboration genuinely happening in organizations. And what I hope it means is that we've got smart marketing, smart education, smart healthcare, but I worry that the abilities of AI will be underexploited because we don't have budget.

Whether we are in the UK, our national health service or our, your equivalent in America or in different states. Education departments, the potential of AI across the board is mind blowing, but requires budget, requires data, requires regulation, safety, so I, I worry that it's real power to crack some of the world's big issues of, of, of ageing and, homelessness and disease prevention.

Is there but that we won't fully exploit it So, I see a number of areas that are macro related and very marketing related as well

[00:41:47] Mike Allton: Yeah, I would agree with that. Although I i'm very optimistic particularly when it comes to marketing because I see, like you mentioned before, so many of the tools that we're using today as marketers, integrating AI capabilities, Salesforce is another one on top of the ones that you already listed, which shows me that we're heading more and more towards what you talked about, being able to personalize, being able to have really accurate attribution, something that, folks who didn't have a huge marketing budget, just had to throw up their hands and say, I don't know.

I don't know why, how many times this person came to my website. I just don't know because I can't afford Marketo. Within a couple of years, they won't have to, spend tens of thousands of dollars a year on really expensive software applications. The websites will know.

[00:42:30] Katie King: I think you're absolutely right.

Yeah, so that answers a question which I often get asked, which is, Is AI accessible to a small marketing team or agency? As it is to major, I think the answer is absolutely yes. You've said yourself, many of these tools are free. Many of them are a kind of an AI brain within a tool we already use for our CRM, et cetera.

So you're spot on there.

[00:42:58] Mike Allton: So. But my last question, Katie, if we're thinking about the kinds of people who in, the early two thousands were feeling very overwhelmed by the pace of change, then, they were used to, tv ads, radio ads, billboard advertising and that kind of stuff. And all of a sudden now they've got to figure out how to build a website.

How to do digital banner advertising, search engines. What were that? That was all new to them is overwhelming for folks who are feeling that way today with Ai, what advice would you give them?

[00:43:30] Katie King: And they are you're absolutely right. That is how they're feeling I think number one is whether you're just new into the industry, you've just come out of a degree in marketing, or like me, you've been doing this for 30 years.

Unfortunately, that means nothing. So we are all on a journey of continuous learning every day being agile. So I think that's number one, we have to be open minded and curious and keep, keep trialing and learning and so on. So that's number one. Number two, and I've got lots, but I'll try and keep them a bit shorter.

Number two, start small, build gradually. Come back to your core fundamentals. What is our business plan? How is marketing helping us achieve our business plan? Where's the client or customer in all of this? The competition. Some of those marketing fundamentals are still Important today, I, I work, I studied Boston Consulting Group and Softmatrix today.

So some of the core fundamentals are still really important. Upskilling, learning, not being afraid to experiment, some of the things that we've touched on, the collaboration. Think to yourself, this is about solving real world problems. Yeah, not just tech for tech's sake. And then celebrating some of those small wins and sharing that progress.

And like I said, having a watching brief on good practice, bad practice, legislation, you've got to really be thinking about to come together as a team, create a task force where someone's pulled from all different departments, learn from one another, become the champions in the company. I think that's really, really important.

And then use the AI to freeze some time up to be a bit more strategic, to be a bit more creative. They would be my main ones. Try and have some fun with it. Life is short, I think by being freed up to be more strategic, maybe we can focus on some of what makes us human. Things I'm thinking of Simon Sinek, why do we do what we do as an organization?

Think about your corporate social responsibility, think about the way the world is changing. Don't be passive, as an organization you need to be proactive. Work with your trade bodies, work with your think tanks, work with academia, get round the table. And this sounds a bit cynical maybe, but by doing some corporate social responsibility and actually being proactive in shaping what the legislation should look like in your sector, it can actually get you round the table and get you in with the movers and shakers in that sector space. So it can actually be a great bonus for your organization. So proactivity, not being passive, continuously learning, experimenting. I could go on, but they, they're probably some of the main ones.

[00:46:35] Mike Allton: That's an absolutely amazing answer. Terrific advice. Katie, you've been an absolute delight. For folks who want to learn more about you or connect with you.

Where should they go?

[00:46:44] Katie King: My website AI In Business. co. uk is probably the best place. From there, you can connect. I'd be delighted to connect with you on LinkedIn, for example. So you can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on AIinBusiness. co. uk. There, you can see the keynotes, the books, and all those great things as well.

So yeah, I'm open to collaborating with lots of different people around the world because I'm very much in favor of helping the world get to grips a bit like a UN treaty. We need to come together and collaborate because this is so, we haven't even touched on some of the big issues of general intelligence and singularity.

We don't need to go there, but we know that AI is out there for defense and for all sorts of potentially dangerous areas. So I think we do need to collaborate internationally as teams of people. Marketing is a great discipline to do that from.

[00:47:47] Mike Allton: Love it. We'll have to have you back to talk about those and unpack those bigger issues at another episode.

So thank you, Katie. Thank you all of you for listening. Like I mentioned before, if this is your first time kind of wrapping your brain around AI and marketing, I got that free AI in Marketing Primer that helps you understand what is ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, what's the difference between them, how to get started.

All that's linked in the show notes, along with everything and every way that you can connect with Katie. That's all the time we've got for today, but thank you so much for listening. Welcome.

That's a wrap on another episode of The AI Hat Podcast. I hope you gained some valuable insights and actionable strategies to boost your business with AI. If you enjoyed this show, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with your network. And don't forget to visit theaihat. com for more resources and to connect with me.

Until next time, keep innovating and remember the future of business is human and it's powered by AI.