A couple of years ago, I published a post on how I thought AI would disrupt writing, editing, and marketing. I wrote, “The notion that people won’t get replaced with A.I., but people who work with A.I., rings true in each of these fields.”
One reason this happens is because AI simply makes an individual more effective. In my work as a marketing director for FGX, I need to keep up with a wide range of tasks.
One week, I could work on founder marketing. The next, I could be working on paid ads for customers who have an urgent need for our services. This might involve tracking attribution for how well our paid ads are going, and troubleshooting problems with our website and marketing software. The week after that, I might need to summarize some insights our operations team have learned and publish it in a blog post, then send a link out through our monthly email to our thousands of past customers.
At a large company, these projects would involve a team of people—a person working in exec comms for the founder marketing stuff, a person working in paid ads, another person working in data science for attribution, a person working in content marketing for the blog post, and a person working in email marketing.
At a smaller company like FGX, that’s not what happens. I’m doing all of it, and with the help of AI, I’m quite effective at it. Some of this stuff is familiar to me—content and email marketing, founder marketing—but some of it is much less so—paid marketing, attribution, website management. The less familiar stuff is much easier for me to learn because of AI.
Whenever I have trouble with something—say, HubSpot isn’t tracking our leads the way it should be—I can turn to ChatGPT and ask what might be happening, and what some alternate solutions might be.
One technique I’ve recently used to great effect is taking screenshots and dropping them into ChatGPT. ChatGPT then responds with numbered next steps and its own thought process, as well as a list of options that I can choose from. (Hat tip to James for the recommendation!)
The experience brought me back to when I was a teenager and learning Photoshop through tutorials on the internet. Except now, it feels like ChatGPT is spitting up a live tutorial for these specific things I need to learn.
On one hand, I feel a bit of fear—how much of this will stick? Perhaps I need to try going through these steps without AI at some point. Another thing to note is to learn the more timeless, conceptual, models of what’s happening.
On the other hand, I feel glad to learn all of this—as well as the meta-practice of practicing working with AI. It enables me to add a lot more value than I would have been able to before. Plus, software, policies, and interfaces change quickly—how much of it is useful for me to permanently learn?
I also recently wrote about how I used AI to edit articles, as well as how leaders trust people—not AI—to be accountable.