My day job gives me the fortunate opportunity to speak with many leaders in marketing communications and with multiple experts in the field of AI. You are somebody that I’ve previously had engaging interactions with on the topic of AI - my goal with this newsletter is to share the thoughts and insights I gain from these conversations. This time:

I’ve not had much chance to newsletter since the Summer, however I did manage to write an article for IMD’s I magazine on AI implementation and business models.

I encourage you to read it (and you will find much more at IMD also), but in the meantime I’ve summarized the key points into a 60 second version with the main sound bites:

Making the impossible possible: How to unlock the real potential of artificial intelligence

Looking at the history of transformation through the lens of technological shifts such as the invention of electricity or the adoption of the Internet we see that change always takes longer than expected*.

(If McKinsey had been around at the dawn of electricity their predictions over the short term would have been flat wrong..)

Historically this is not down to technology maturity, but driven by prevailing management thinking. The tendency is to initially focus on efficiency gains (minor benefits) and only later comes the more fundamental thinking about what we do today and why we do it.

It is at this point that the world changes suddenly, and change becomes an all or nothing game with industries and functions changed fundamentally and forever (illustrated with a few examples).

I put it down to one imperative question “how can we do what could not be done before?” (Making the impossible possible…)

I answer and explore these issues in a lot more detail in the article. And I’m always available for a chat about them.

Thanks for listening to me play out my thoughts,

Mark.

* Another example: The first commercial farm tractor went on sale in the US in 1907. It is hard to imagine a more transformative technology with a sounder business case, yet it was not until the 1950’s that more than 50% of US farms owned a tractor.