Diamonds and Pearls

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, not a rock star, but a CMO and trusted advisor, and in this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of marketing street knowledge that I hope will help unlock the rockstar marketer in you.

Hi there,

There is a lot of talk about how AI will reshape our organizations - one theory is that they will become diamond-shaped.

For as long as we’ve industrialized labor, the classic view has been a pyramid-shaped organization, with leaders at the top, then middle managers, and a legion of juniors at the bottom.

The theory is that, as entry-level jobs get hollowed out by AI, we'll end up with a few leaders at the top, a fat bit in the middle of middle managers, and fewer junior folks beneath. A diamond-shaped organization.

Which would seem like a logical step if these agents were a genuine replacement for the warm bodies that hold up our organizations. But, as analysts have observed (such as in this Forrester podcast), in many organizations, agentic technology isn't fully implemented or ready to replace the people they’ve reportedly already fired. Forrester went so far as to describe this as “the dirty little secret of AI”.

And, as we’ve discussed on the podcast, it’s still not entirely clear what effect AI is really having on our organizations.

It’s creating new work, making us better but slower in some cases, enabling us to do tasks we couldn’t do before, and giving us the confidence to try things we really shouldn’t be doing - and of course doing work that used to take more people. But it’s not a simple correlation of more AI = fewer people.

It’s not just the readiness and availability of the technology, which is improving and being adopted at a greater rate; it’s also about the expertise we are losing in our people. As we’ve all observed, the performance and quality of what we get from an LLM is only as good as the person working the machine.

You have to have a level of subject matter expertise to have the taste and discernment to judge what good looks like, or even if the whole thing is a hallucination. Especially when those hallucinations are plausible; if you don’t know the topic, your AI chum will state those ideas with such conviction it’s hard to challenge them.

My friend, author, content marketing godfather, gifted mixologist, and regular podcast guest Robert Rose has picked up on this, as he’s concerned about where our next set of leaders will come from. Not just leaders of people, but leaders of the agents too - people with enough expertise to stop our skills quietly atrophying.

Robert has also been writing about what he calls “the expertise illusion”: how leaning on AI makes us think less while feeling more confident:

Which sounds like an AI dependency can cause an extreme case of the Dunning-Kruger effect: “the cognitive bias where people with low competence or limited knowledge in a specific domain drastically overestimate their own skills and expertise” (according to Wikipedia).

There are no simple fixes here, certainly not in the scope of this newsletter, whether it’s the thesis of our organizations turning into diamonds or us unhooking ourselves from the AI expertise crack pipe.

We are going to need to influence our organizations to look beyond the short-term benefits AI promises and invest in the long term, hiring a bench of experts, future people leaders, and those who will become the managers of our AI agents.

And as individuals, we need to encourage marketing professionals not to default to the easy button, but to develop the expertise to make that easy button work better. And who can resist an easy button?

Which brings me to the pearls in the title.

A pearl only forms through grit and irritation over time. That's our people’s expertise, earned by doing the work, getting it wrong, being frustrated, being corrected. And the easy button removes that essential grit.

They say diamonds are forever, but they won’t be without the pearls.

And finally… it gives me an excuse to play Prince’s Diamonds and Pearls on the Beat jukebox.

What do you think? Hit reply, let me know.

Have a splendid week!

Cheers,

Ian

Sending this on a Friday this week, a great way to kick off the weekend…