Welcome to an end-of-week update from Unmade. Today: In an AI-focused edition, we explore what really happens inside teams when management fail to take the lead on new technology. Plus, an extraordinarily good day for the Unmade Index.
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HumAIn’s AI Upfronts revealed: CMO chatbot, content creation tools, brand safe buying and IP management
humAIn curator Cat McGinn writes:
I’m thrilled to announce the lineup for our AI Upfronts which will return to HumAIn as a a fast-paced pitch session shining a spotlight on the innovators and pioneers shaping the future of AI for the media and marketing world.
As a further focus on innovation, HumAIn will feature a discussion on what venture capitalists are seeing emerging locally. And the conference will be kicked off with a welcome from Industry Minister Ed Husic.
In alphabetical order, these are the four AI Upfronts presentations:
AirStack.ai - using AI for risk free handling of brand assets
The current state of AI is full of hype, cluttered with disjointed ‘cookie-cutter’ solutions that are each fraught with security, IP and legal risks that can backfire for your brand. The ability to innovate, save time, cut costs and ensure you don’t get left behind with AI can feel overwhelming.
Tom Pitney, the founder of innovation agency AirStack, will demonstrate a suite of customised AI tools designed specifically for creative, media, content, and brand teams. These tools are developed to protect organisations’ intellectual property and brand guidelines, and offer secure and effective integration into existing workflows.
Pitney has recently worked with the Independent Media Agencies of Australia to create the IMAA’s 10 AI Guiding Principles.
The CMO Chatbot - a marketing PA
The CMO Chatbot has been developed by Atomic 212’s James Dixon. The CMO Chatbot is a personal assistant in your pocket that knows what campaigns you have live, how many sales you are getting, what products are performing best and what marketing actions you should take this week.
The AI powered chatbot has been developed with marketers in mind, to provide the marketing team with real time intelligence on everything that’s going on, and what they might expect to happen in the near future. Dixon is cofounder and Chief Digital Office of one of Australia’s largest independent media agencies Atomic 212, and also the co-founder of NextBrain, a generative business intelligence tool that aims to bring real-time business insight to the C-suite.
Leonardo.ai - rapid image creation
Australian image generation startup Leonardo.Ai aims to empower creativity with AI. Launched in December 2022, it has quickly reached 12m users worldwide. Last year the company raised $47m to fuel its growth. Leonardo.Ai offers a content creation suite powered by generative AI which provides customers with the ability to train custom models on their own intellectual property. Users are creating 4.5 million images a day.
Jessie Hughes, senior creative technologist, will present the pitch at the AI Upfronts. Hughes is an internationally recognised new media artist, technologist, scholar and screenwriter who has collaborated with Meta, Oculus and Adobe.
Public AI - Delivering brand stories
Public AI is the operating system for creative excellence. Elevate buying strategies with Public AI's high-impact ad placements, targeting audiences in the moments that matter most. Experience seamless, brand-safe delivery across the open web, tailored to your unique objectives for remarkable campaign outcomes. Public AI has over 400 publishing and brand partners including The Guardian, Google, Netflix, Vodafone, and Tourism Australia. Country Director, Australia, Public AI Adam O'Neill will present the solution. Adam is a seasoned marketing leader with a proven track record of driving growth for global brands including Unilever, Tourism Australia, Rolex and Red Bull.
And in a complementary session to the AI Upfronts, leading local venture capitalists will reflect on the pitches, trends and direction of travel in AI innovation and share their expectations for the industry.
The panel includes Andrea Gardiner, CEO of Jelix Ventures; Annie Liao, founder of Build Club, a startup accelerator and Australia’s first dedicated AI incubator, and Emily Rich of VC firm M8 Ventures. The firm specialises in investing in pre-seed and early-stage technology firms. Rich was previously Managing Director of Startups for APAC at Microsoft.
And HumAIn will be kicked off with a video address recorded for delegates by Ed Husic, the Federal Minister for Industry and Science.
HumAIn takes place in Sydney on May 28. Earlybird tickets, offering a saving of 20%, are available for the next three weeks only.
What they do in the shadows
Cat McGinn continues:
Curating the content for humAIn, the sense of staring into the abyss - and the abyss staring back - has been less frequent than last year.
I still believe there are existential risks associated with AI, but the more pressing issues for media and marketing are often a little more mundane.
This is a lot less thrilling than talking about the Singularity, or making Terminator references but a present day threat is what some experts refer to as “shadow AI.”
I would broadly group the AI adoption mindset in Australian organisations in three categories.
Those who have taken the plunge, forging ahead without much of a plan or a compass. Let’s call them ‘the off-roaders.’ It’s a fun ride, but you’re going to spend a lot of time getting bogged, and in some cases, need an assist to get to firmer ground.
Then there are the organisations taking such deliberate, slow steps and in such a constrained way that they’ll have been lapped three times by their competitors, and the business impact will be so minor they’ve lost market share on the way. Let’s call them the Sunday drivers.
And then the third group are watching and waiting, with a foot on the brake and the handbrake ratcheted all the way up.
While there are many organisations, seemingly reasonably making this decision to wait until the legal, social and operational norms have been established (a polite way of saying preparing the popcorn and waiting for another business to fuck up) - the key issue is that many of their staff do not share this view.
We ran a highly unscientific poll on Linkedin, which found a third of respondents are using genAI tools regardless of any business-wide ban on doing so. Other data indicates this figure could be as high as 60-70%, with a third (31%) admitting to inputting potentially sensitive information like customer details, employee information and company financials.
This speaks to the bigger question about the often tedious nature of work. Even very senior folk are still required to spend more time than they would like doing boring, unimaginative, repetitious tasks.
I would argue your company should reward you for finding faster, more efficient ways of doing the parts of your job that do not fire up your dopamine receptors, leaving you with cognitive surplus to be innovative, creative, delivering more value or higher performance, whatever that looks like for you.
However, doing this in clandestine fashion carries risks.
I think, build, experiment and write about AI daily and, quite frankly, I cannot keep up.
An overworked marketer trying desperately to claw back enough time to think strategically is even less likely to be able to stay current, especially using genAI in a rogue fashion, unsupported and with no one to call when things go south.
Not only are new tools and capabilities being developed every day, but even the way they function is shifting.
The likelihood that your team have audited all available tools, understood the licensing, rights management, data compliance and privacy requirements of each is vanishingly small.
Some 90% of cyber breaches are caused by human error. That should give you a frame of reference for the possible pitfalls.
There is a risk that your team is not using an AI solution that’s genuinely fit for purpose, but instead creating inefficiencies by using a mish-mash of almost-but-not-quite-tools, or giving you a sense of speed but actually giving outputs that don’t truly deliver the outcomes you need.
The other, bigger concern is the potential for legal hot water. Have your staff fully understood the rights requirements? Are you using tools with a licensing agreement that is fit for the territory you operate in? Does this cookie-cutter large language model solution have adequate safeguards around customer data; is it GDPR compliant?
We know that a key issue in martech is under-utilisation. Companies invest heavily in large and sophisticated tech stacks they don’t have the resources to deploy effectively. What tends to happen is that companies blame the vendor, rather than the systemic issues that prevent effective technological adoption and transformation.
AI technologies offer us such incredible possibilities that it would be a great shame to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
As Stela Solar, Director of Australia's National AI Centre said in a conversation at a Women in AI event last week, “get comfortable with ambiguity, because no one has all the answers.”
What’s needed here is an agile, flexible mindset, the willingness to be transparent within an organisation about the real shortcomings of the processes and workflows you currently have in place, and an open-mindedness about how to solve them.
So much of what happens in companies is by default and not by design, and it’s ripe for disruption.
AI gives us an opportunity to rework work. And like it or not, if you don’t take that opportunity, your team will do it without you.
Unmade Index sees a big rebound
Tim Burrowes writes:
The Unmade Index had one of its best days of the year to date on Thursday, outperforming the wider ASX to grow by 3.04% to 588.7 points. Every major listed media and marketing stock (with the exception of Seven West Media which stood still) headed upwards.
Nine led the pack, up by 3.82%, closely followed by ARN Media (up 3.68%) and Ooh Media (up 2.56%).
At the bijou end of town, Vinyl and Aspermont both swung upwards by 14.29% each, while Motio lost 17.86% after putting on 21.74% the day before.
Time to leave you to your Friday.
I’ll be back tomorrow with Best of the Week after five days on the road, in Perth and Melbourne. Among the topics I’m thinking about for tomorrow: How wastage has moved back up the agenda; the local implications of Apollo’s US$11bn bid for parts of Paramount, and why the TV networks seem determined to drag each other down like crabs in a bucket (your theories please...)
Have a great day.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media
Good article. They'll be a few people making quite a lot of money out of this. They will be equipped, as happened in the early .com era, with the gift of the gab and no more idea where this is going than anybody else. Dangerous combo. Someone is going to get burned to a crisp by listening to these people, unless the senior people in the big marketing companies grasp the nettle and try as best they can, to rein in these A.I. carpet-baggers who report to them, take control and guide the process with care and caution . Even if, as their little smarties will no doubt try to do, circumvent their authority. Why? Because they'll sense their seniors re not contemporary enough to understand. There's not much room for error here. ''A little knowledge is dangerous'' comes to mind. Control it CFOs, before someone gets hurt.