Explore the future of marketing in an AI-first world with Mike Wickham and Aaron Dicks. This video tackles the big questions facing brands today: How to generate high-quality content, where to invest for the best results, and what the role of a marketer will be in the age of AI agents.
In this video, you’ll learn:
- The Evolution of Content: Discover why the current reward system for AI-generated content may change and why a new model for compensating creators is on the horizon.
- Beyond Human Behaviour: With the rise of AI agents that can do things like shopping for consumers, learn why marketers must now think about how to market to both human behaviour and artificial intelligence.
- Investing in the Right Places: Find out how to make smart decisions about where to invest your resources—whether in new technology, skills, or people—in a market that’s changing at lightning speed.
- The Future of the Marketer: The experts highlight that while many jobs will change, new ones will emerge. The key is to focus on what AI can’t replicate: strategic oversight, creative curation, and shaping the way AI systems work.
Transcript
Mike Wickham: There are two angles to this, aren’t there, especially when it comes to content. I suppose you’re using or utilising AI to help generate that content, but then I guess you’re not necessarily getting rewarded for that content, as the systems are currently set up. How do you see that evolving? How might we be able to reward content creators? If it’s not traffic currently, what would it be?
Aaron Dicks: I think Cloudflare’s approach, so some of those recent changes, is an interesting one. It’s now happened, and I think it’s the first of these big moves, so it’ll be interesting to see how that works. I think that really works for creators and publishers, and whether or not all of these big tech companies that have these models are willing to pay, and how that plays out, is yet to be seen. As I said, businesses are more than likely always going to be submitting their content for visibility because they want to be shown in these recommendations.
I mean, on the other side of this coin as well, I think when we’re talking about content generation, that’s probably where it’s worth thinking about all of the creative outputs that are possible. Currently, they’ve been trained on a lot of this information, which is now sort of behind these large LLM firewalls. So how is that going to continue to evolve, and what role do marketers have in curating the inputs and sort of training their own models to generate something that is unique? Because the challenge with these models is that they’re essentially levelling the playing field.
Mike Wickham: So, in terms of how AI is going to evolve, outside of brands and agencies, what will the impact be on consumers? The example I often talk about is that in the future we’ll probably be utilising AI agents in our personal lives, potentially doing our shopping for us. So, it’s going to become even trickier for marketers to understand how to not only market to individual human behaviour but also potentially to a bot that is tasked with doing their shopping for them. So how do we navigate that? What do brands need to think about, and how do marketing strategies evolve to account for the fact that we’re now, in the future, potentially marketing to robots with completely different behaviour?
Aaron Dicks: I think there are still quite a few things that, as marketers, we can still actually have a lot of control over, and quite a lot of this is unwritten at the moment as well. So it’s a bit of a moving beast. Particularly when it comes to the data that’s going into these systems, we want these systems, as a consumer, to work flawlessly, right? And with full, complete trust and reliability. Perhaps we’re not quite there just yet, so as marketers and professionals in this space, we can really help shape how these systems work and how these experiences work. And there are still clearly quite a few jobs to be done there.
Mike Wickham: I guess the difficulty for brands at the moment is knowing when to invest and what tools to fully invest in, given that the market and the landscape are changing so rapidly.
Aaron Dicks: For every business, the timeline is going to be different. But everybody now could be experimenting with these tools and understanding what’s right for them. In the cloud, you can already play with image generation, copy generation, video generation, and even whole movie generation. I think testing and learning, and exploring, is probably the only way to answer that for every single business.
Mike Wickham: So, where do we need to invest in terms of development, skills, and people in the future to get the best out of AI?
Aaron Dicks: Jobs will change as a result of AI being brought into the workforce, particularly through more agentic operations. In every technological revolution to date, there’s always been new jobs that come off the back of it. But an opportunity really is for businesses to consider what it looks like after AI is already there, if it’s not already, and how do we augment it, work with it, and push the business forward through that.
