If you’ve sat in any conversation about business lately, it’s difficult to avoid the conversation about AI. So it’s natural that there’s a mix of optimism, upspoken fear, anxiety, confusion, and resentment for it. These emotions always drive questions and comments about it.
However, one troubling ‘hot take’ I have seen recently is the blanket statement: “AI will not replace humans on the job” because humans bring perspective, nuances, and rigor – you know the rest. I think a lot of us miss the point about being replaced, so permit me to share three personal experiences:
1. Content Development: I rounded off a project recently. Two of the four content writers Japa-ed. We didn’t replace them. Fundamentally, content development is ideation, writing/creating, reviewing, and publishing. In these, creating takes the bulk of the effort. Our two writers spend their time ideating, but they prompt their IA engines to write, then spend time moderating, refining, and nuancing, and finally, they press the publish button or go to production. The result? We recorded even better domain authority than when we had four writers, because who understands SEO or GEO more than machines? That’s two jobs gone. And the bonus? The two writers are improving every day in their use of AI. Maybe someday, we will need only one writer who will now have a new title: “AI Creator” or “AI Moderator”.
2. Data Analyses: on the same project, we focused on collecting data accurately, set up the right data architecture, and feed data into the AI machine. AI crunches the numbers faster and could show us different dimensions in minutes. Report gets done pronto! We have just one data analyst who moderate with the AI, interprets the results, nuance it to our operations and shares with us the implications and the implementation programme. At least two data analysts would have been needed for the volume of work. That’s another data analyst job off the shelf.
3. Campaign: Last week, I was invited to ARAMANDA3.0 by Chain Reaction Africa. The bottom line? Culture is changing faster than the marketing strategy and campaigns processes! Let’s assume for the purpose of this argument that brands must respond to each of these subcultures and stay on the trends. That means we need faster and cost-effective ways of creating campaigns or marketing programmes. How can we get that done on time before the fleeting trends fizzle out? AI. So what happens to agencies’ brief-to-execution process when clients are so pressed for time and campaigns no longer hold their magic? Your guess is as good as mine. Agencies may not die, but they might also not have enough briefs to hire as should have been required. Those are jobs that could have been that are not being created.
So, when new technological realities indicate that tools or machines will improve productivity and efficiency, it doesn’t mean that they will eliminate all jobs; it just means they will replace some. Think back to the four industrial revolutions we have experienced: technology took jobs, but it also created others. The bad news is when we all sit on our hands and pontificate on a phenomenon that no one can claim to fully understand.
In one of our DM chats, a friend, Tosin Balogun, Strategy Director of Scanad Africa, opined that we’re treating AI the same way we treated Digital Marketing – fearing and resenting it rather than embracing it. And what happened to Digital Marketing? A new set of marketers with technical and specialist capabilities emerged. We all know the rest of the story.
Let’s not get it twisted. It’s time to reskill. These ‘hot takes’ are preventing us from having the right conversations about the future of our profession. They are making the young professionals too complacent because we’re not even challenging them. We’re using our nascent understanding to deprive them of exploring the possibilities of what will shape their professional future. We are focusing on ‘catching’ them when they use AI and beating our chest that we can smell AI work from afar, rather than challenging them to use it better.
Let me end with Tosin’s quote to me: “Anything that can learn can get better. Anything that can get better can become powerful. Anything that can become powerful can replace.”
