Many CEOs believe that automated tools can enable leaner teams to achieve more, leading them to consider reducing marketing headcount. Surprisingly, these top executives are even contemplating more extensive cuts, with a recent survey showing that 49% of CEOs think that most or all of their own roles could be automated or replaced by AI.
Gen AI isn’t a quick solution, at least not yet. It’s too early to determine what’s effective, what’s not, and how future AI applications will develop. None of us can predict the potential impact on crucial matters like employee morale and retention, copyright, bias amplification, and data privacy.
Using Generative AI Should Not Lead to a Reduction in Your Startup’s Marketing Team
Here’s my advice to CEOs: Before making any staffing choices, collaborate with your CMO to carry out focused and measurable trials of generative AI tools. Then, use the insights gained to shape both your organizational structure and marketing strategies.
Request Your CMO to Offer Regular Updates on Use Cases for Generative AI
To begin any discussion, assess the current usage of gen AI within the marketing team. You might find it’s already in use for a wide range of tasks such as content production, corporate and product messaging, organizational design, image generation, presentation slides, meeting summaries, and more. As time passes, you can pinpoint trends and productivity improvements to decide which tasks the marketing team should continue handling and which can be delegated to gen AI, allowing staff to focus on more strategic work.
Completing this task is straightforward, like creating a spreadsheet. I’ve devised a system for monitoring gen AI use cases at our portfolio companies, to which marketing leaders contribute as a shared “database.” It collects date-stamped information about the tools in use, their best and worst applications, query techniques, and other relevant insights. I utilize it to exchange lessons learned with colleagues and CMOs at portfolio companies, and it can be easily implemented within a single organization.
