While the world gets carried away with LLMs and speeding up processes with automation, Adam Naisbitt is looking much further ahead – and he says the future of marketing teams is looking a little wobbly.
“I get the sense that we’re kind of sleepwalking into the end of our jobs,” he says.
“A lot of people are in denial. It’s like they’ve heard a tiny, tiny, 1% soundbite of what AI can do, then they’ve gone, ‘Oh, I understand. This is never going to replace me!’”
“I worry that we’re being too slow to adopt it. And it’s a mistake to equate it to, ‘It just helps you create content’.”
Adam is the founder of Robainhood, as well as a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing.
Over the past year, he’s developed an AI tool that can generate a complete marketing strategy from start to finish, including competitor analysis, customer profiling, positioning, campaigns, content plans, and task breakdowns – all without any input from a professional marketer.
It can then break down the strategy into more granular detail, delivering daily, weekly and monthly tasks for its human counterpart to put into action.
But while the tool itself could be game-changing, Adam is concerned about the impact this kind of technology will have on the future of marketing agencies.
“We’re all fascinated with the shiny GPTs and how they can help us produce three hundred Facebook ad headlines, but there’s this much more serious looming presence,” he says.
“I’m just one guy in Milton Keynes. If I can replace myself in just a few months, what happens to us when a Silicon Valley startup with millions in funding hits the market?”
Adam believes that AI will significantly change the way marketing teams operate. He suggests marketing systems will evolve to have a two-tier structure – with the people who set the objective at the top, then the ‘button clickers’ who do the work the AI can’t do itself (yet).
“Marketing is massively fractured now. You can’t be an expert in everything. So if you’re a junior marketer, or the one marketer in a business and they want you to do everything, this is gonna be a game changer. It will give you everything you need.”
“But for those in the middle or at the top – in two years, I don’t know what they’re going to be doing.”
In this session, Adam will talk through the thinking behind his new tool and share examples of what may be on the horizon for the marketing industry – and we’ll discuss what this could mean for the architecture of marketing agencies.