With or Without You

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.

Hello Rock Star :-)

It’s interesting where we are in the hype cycle when it comes to AI.

Some feel it’s like the dot-com bubble of the late nineties and early noughties, about to burst, and there may be a bit of that in company valuations.

But there’s a difference. Back then, the technology was largely in the hands of companies - the poster children of dot-com boomy busty’ness, like pets.com - and the effects played out in businesses and the stock market. As consumers, we mostly watched.

LLMs, from ChatGPT to Claude and Gemini, are the ultimate PLG (product-led growth) motion because they’re in the hands of everyone.

You’ve heard the bullshit that AI won’t replace your job, but someone using it will; do you know anyone who doesn’t whittle something artisanal with their hands who is not using AI?

And, like crack dealers handing out free product to get us hooked, the price is great right now.

However, the conversation I’m increasingly having, including in recent podcast chats with Cathy McKnight and Simon Daniels, is whether businesses are actually seeing an ROI from this thing.

According to the two separate studies Cathy and Simon brought to the pod, only about 40% of companies are seeing a positive ROI.

That feels understandable. In my experience, and from many of the conversations I’m having, LLMs add time to certain tasks, opening up new research possibilities and meaning we often do the same job better, but take longer doing it.

We’re also using them to do things we couldn’t do before, not simply making ourselves more efficient and, apparently, out of a job, but attempting things we previously couldn’t afford because we lacked the time or money.

My chum Robert Rose shared a neat quadrant back in June that speaks to this point. It plots the things we marketers are using AI for against whether they represent a new or existing capability, and whether they make us more or less efficient.

His analysis of more than 500 use cases found that 45% involved existing capabilities being performed less efficiently.

This messes with an ROI calculation.

Financially, AI is both a consumer product and a corporate IT investment. People are bringing their own LLMs to work, often putting the subscription through expenses, outside the tightly measured IT budget. That makes it difficult to measure the total investment and, therefore, the return.

And if we pull at the thread of Robert’s work, it’s murky as to whether we are more or less efficient when we work with AI.

Sometimes we’re doing more, which is great, that’s an ROI story, but it isn’t necessarily the work we planned to do or included in this year’s investment in our teams and technology.

Sometimes it adds friction to tasks we’ve always done. They may be done better, but not as quickly, which appears to drag down the ROI.

Or does it, if we’re doing them better?

How do you define efficiency?

How do you define the return we are getting?

Plus, and we’re all seeing this, AI can make previously unaffordable activity cheap enough to produce while still creating something nobody needed. Do we really need another vibe-coded CRM?

AI breaks the way we’ve traditionally measured ROI. It isn’t a single technology, like a CRM, where we can compare a clear before and after and point to a spreadsheet that shows the change.

When it comes to AI, Pandora is out of her box; there is no stopping this. And, as usual with my writing, that leaves me with more questions than answers, which leads me to this week’s tune: With or Without You by U2.

When it comes to the ROI of AI, perhaps we need to ask what this would have cost without AI, and whether we would have done it at all.

That’s it this week. Please take a look at the marketing street knowledge I’ve shared below.

Have a splendid week,

Cheers,

Ian

This one is a classic…