Scrolling through social media, you'll find plenty of content lamenting that AI will replace personnel in the marketing & communications industry, and then you'll be replaced too, along with countless guides saying: "Copywriting/content/planning is dead, here's a set of prompts to…"
These people usually fall into 3 groups:
Don't work in the industry, don't understand the industry at all, just want to create clickbait/ragebait content for their own purposes
Work in the industry, use AI Chatbots daily but aren't clear on their own differences from AI, and occasionally suffer from existential crisis
Business owners with FOMO, see everyone hyped about AI Automation, read lots of articles about AI trends in MarCom, and think about cutting staff every day but don't really understand AI in MarCom
Sequoia (one of the world's largest venture capital funds that once invested in Apple, Google, NVIDIA) conducted a very interesting study on opportunities for applying AI in the service industry, which naturally includes MarCom, and presented it as an Opportunity Map like in the image.
Source: Sequoia
I'll explain this Opportunity Map before discussing AI in MarCom.
Y-axis Outsourced vs. Insourced: Using AI to serve clients who hire you (outsource) or to solve your own company's problems (insource).
X-axis Judgement vs. Intelligence: This axis is very interesting. Judgement is the ability to make sound decisions, while intelligence is the ability to understand and know things. If knowing how to write a creative brief is intelligence because it has set patterns, then choosing which strategy or creative approach to solve the problem requires judgement. Another example in coding: writing code is intelligence, while deciding which feature to build next to win in the market requires judgement.
Judgement is very different. To make judgement, we need intuition, taste, and experience accumulated over many years.
Looking at this Opportunity Map, you'll see 4 quadrants corresponding to 4 territories of opportunities/ways to apply AI in different industries.
Quadrant #1 (Outsourced x Judgement): Co-pilot
AI plays the role of co-pilot; you still have to decide the direction yourself, then AI will help you implement and you deliver to clients. PR & Comms appears in this territory, as does part of MarCom. To create a targeted IMC Plan that fits the market context and consumer insights, AI cannot replace you in developing strategy or campaign framework (correctly), it can only suggest activities based on statistics it knows. It cannot judge whether a specific activity fits this particular market or customer group.
Quadrant #2 (Outsourced x Intelligence): Autopilot
AI flies the plane itself (autopilot), you don't need to do anything, then deliver the results to clients. For example, I have a friend working in medical coding abroad whose job is to read doctors' medical notes and convert them into codes (used to classify diseases, symptoms, disabilities and health conditions) as defined by the WHO. This work is clearly Intelligence; you just need to upload the doctor's notes and press a button and AI will do everything (of course the doctor's handwriting needs to be… legible), and there are already companies providing this solution, sooner or later humans will leave this to AI. As for MarCom, I think AI has no place in this quadrant yet, especially in strategic & IMC Planning. If there is, it would be administrative tasks like preparing quotations, contracts, or writing meeting recaps.
Quadrant #3 (Insourced x Judgement): Watch
AI applications in this quadrant are in early stages and need time to "watch" (monitor further and confirm), such as recruitment, market research, and advertising. According to this research, companies are tending to find their own AI solutions for advertising rather than hiring agencies, similar to how companies want to build in-house agencies to increase speed, optimize costs and resources (in Vietnam there are companies like Baemin, MoMo, Masan, Vinamilk, Unilever, etc.).
What's common with PR & Comms in quadrant #1 is that 'judgement' still remains with humans, specifically the client side here. If you're a Brand/Marketing/Communications Manager/Director who wants to use AI without hiring an agency, you must remember that you can't just write a client brief and have AI do it; you also have to think like an agency to create a creative brief. Simply put, anyone who has lived two lives will have an advantage in the future when working with AI, because they'll have sharper 'judgement'.
This is also the main goal of my Strategic & IMC Planning course: to help you form clear thinking patterns and develop 'judgement' ability when working with AI. And you also won't suffer existential crisis from hearing stories about AI replacing you all day, and business owners will also be more level-headed instead of chasing the AI hype.
Quadrant #4 (Insourced x Intelligence)
According to Sequoia, this will be the next wave in industries like asset management, fund management, and supply chain & procurement. The difference from quadrant #2 is that the company itself wants to find solutions to do in-house rather than outsource anymore.
In summary, sooner or later AI will be able to do almost all work that is essentially intelligence-based (except a few specialized fields requiring physical presence like healthcare, cooking, beauty, construction, etc.), but judgement it still leaves to humans.
Therefore, anyone doing intelligence work needs to seriously consider preparing for a second career that AI cannot replace, and anyone doing primarily judgement work, especially Planners in the MarCom/Advertising industry, need to sharpen their judgement ability to get the best results when working with AI, and it doesn't matter if you don't have AI.
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