AI Is Everywhere at SXSW, but Humanity Still Leads

AI is ubiquitous at South by Southwest. It underpins hallway conversations, happy hours, onstage discussions, keynotes, and coffee meetups. The reality is that generative AI is changing everything, fast.

That’s as true for marketing as it is for any industry. AI is transforming workflows, speeding up creative production, upending predictable marketing funnels, and creating personalized targeting and product discovery.

A group of high-level brand and agency executives gathered at ADWEEK House at SXSW to discuss how they’re implementing and experimenting with new tech without losing human connection and creativity.

AI isn’t always going to save time

AI can bring efficiencies to workflows, but that doesn’t always mean that you’re going to save time overall, executives said. There’s a lot of legwork involved in adding new tech into an organization.

“You can’t take an AI capability and just put it on top of old processes, old technology, and expect that the people move—and expect that all of a sudden, your company culture is going to shift,” said Ndidi Oteh, global CEO of Accenture Song.

“How do we think about talent, or how do we make sure we have an operating level that supports that? How do we make sure we have a workbench that is more than a point solution, but transforms the way that we work?”

Stephanie Mencarelli, vp of design for Adobe’s document cloud, pointed to a study showing that about 15% of people working in tech are AI “power users.”

“The cognitive dissonance right now is real,” Mencarelli said. “What is the hype versus what is the reality?”

People using AI aren’t necessarily working less, noted Allison Stransky, CMO of Samsung. Instead, they’re actually putting in more hours. She said they’re energized by AI, and time saved is redeployed elsewhere.

Know AI’s boundaries

For marketers, it’s critical to understand where ethical guardrails need to be enforced, executives agreed.

“Connectedness matters more than ever,” said Attica Jaques, CMO at Ancestry. That’s especially true within companies, she said, highlighting the close collaboration that exists between tech, engineering, and marketing at Ancestry.

“Our CTO says, ‘We’re not going to make your ancestors dance,’” she continued. “That, inherently, is a principle of what we’re willing to do and not do, because AI can.”

Those guardrails are what will dictate the boundaries of the future, noted Kimberly Storin, CMO of Zoom.

“It’s going to be such an important part of where humanity goes,” Storin said.

Wesley ter Haar, co-founder and chief AI officer at Monks, added that marketers are finally able to make good on the promise of personalization on a massive scale in real time, thanks to these models.

“The models are clearly good enough to parse through massive amounts of data in close to real time, which means that there’s an unlock there,” he said.

But as the tech progresses, “everything is on the table,” ter Haar warned. “When it comes to things like taste as a human skill set—I think we all want that to be a human skill set. I think because of that, we will make it a predominantly human skill set for quite a few years to come.”

Know a brand’s value

Beyond guardrails, companies also need to know what their foundational values are, said Ray Kunik, head of digital at 3M.

“Transformation begins within, but trust is the currency of philosophy,” he said. “If you’re not centered on who you are and what you’re standing for, and think about that internally and external, then what are you building on?”

Reflecting on how much has changed over the last six months, participants also argued that leaders must stay flexible.

“As much as we need to have a vision for the future, every day, it changes,” said Josh Line, CMO at Yahoo.

As these changes revolutionize how people live their lives, it’s also important to stay rooted in the present, or risk leaving swaths of your customer base behind.

“Once upon a time, every single ad ended with, ‘Go to www dot…,’” said Stransky. “That’s gonna be AI very soon, but today we’re still in the education phase.”