From tool user to system architect
Most marketers now use AI tools. Fewer have designed the systems those tools work inside, and that is where the results are decided.
What would it take for a machine to be present?
Fluent machines force an old question back into the open: is being present to the world the same as processing it?
When the customer is a machine
Some purchases are already made by software acting for a person. Marketing management has to plan for a buyer that reads specifications, not slogans.
Social media is now an algorithmic system, not a channel
Platforms no longer show people what they follow so much as what a ranking system predicts they will engage with. Marketing has to start there.
Education after the machines can do the homework
If a machine can produce the essay, the essay was never the point. What schools were really teaching is now easier to see.
The established discipline still does the work
New technology tempts teachers to throw out the syllabus. Strategy, segmentation and positioning are more useful now, not less.
Judgement is not a calculation
We increasingly ask machines to decide. The word we use for good deciding, judgement, names something calculation alone does not supply.
Who answers when the machine did the work?
Responsibility used to follow the person who acted. When a system acts, it has to be assigned on purpose, or it disappears.
Four ways of asking whether a machine is conscious
Arguments about machine consciousness often fail because the two sides are answering different questions. Separating them helps.
The quiet engineering of wanting
Clicking ‘I agree’ is supposed to protect our choices. When the choice itself is shaped by design, consent needs a harder look.
Knowledge work when answers are cheap
For decades knowledge workers were paid to produce answers. When answers are cheap, the valuable work moves upstream.
Marketing still begins with a person
Tools for reaching customers have never been more powerful. The foundation they rest on has not changed: someone has a need, and you either meet it or you do not.