Transcript

Jason Mlicki (00:01.72)
So Jeff, I’ve been thinking. We’re about to talk about marketing roles. So marketing roles for a firm. But it got me thinking, and we’re using your framework of the six roles of a marketing organization. But it got me thinking, what are the roles in this podcast? What’s your role and what’s my role? And I have an opinion about what they are. And I’d like to hear your opinion to see if we’re alive, if we mesh. You want to go first? You want me to go first? Since I’m pretty good on you.

Jeff (00:30.382)
I’ll go first. I’ll go first. Our roles are very clearly delineated. You are the talent and I am the straight man.

Jason Mlicki (00:33.398)
Okay, let’s see what you got.

Jason Mlicki (00:38.295)
Okay.

Jason Mlicki (00:43.058)
boy, but that’s not one of the six rules. The talent and the straight man. Okay, well, see, you broke the system though. I was going off the six rules of the marketing org. And I had you as well me as the idealist, the one that advocates for the listeners and the higher ideals of marketing and the podcast, and you as the enforcer.

Jeff (00:59.45)
Ciao!

Jason Mlicki (01:06.722)
who constantly brings us back to consensus around your brand preference framework. Everything comes back to your brand preference framework, the enforcer of the brand preference framework.

Jeff (01:19.509)
That’s true. You know, I’ve been reflecting on that since our last recording. I think it’s been released where you’re like, Jeff, it all comes back to that. And when you said that, you offended me. I was like, and I was like, it always comes back to that. But the truth is, it always comes back to that.

Jason Mlicki (01:30.198)
Ha ha ha!

Jason Mlicki (01:35.402)
I knew I did, that’s why I did it.

Jason Mlicki (01:44.654)
You

Jeff (01:46.453)
It always comes back to that. And why does it always come back to that?

Jason Mlicki (01:53.292)
Because you make it. Come back to that. See, you’re the enforcer.

Jeff (01:56.493)
That’s, that’s yeah. Yeah. So, point well taken. My, my idealist friend.

Jason Mlicki (02:07.15)
The talent and the straight man. like that. That should have been name of the podcast. The talent and the straight man.

Jeff (02:13.048)
Yeah, I still think the title should be So, Jeff. Jeff.

Jason Mlicki (02:13.538)
Alright.

Jason Mlicki (02:17.966)
So common to the opening of every podcast, all 200 plus. Okay. So we’re talking about marketing roles today. Well, we’re actually talking about the impact of AI or how AI is changing the marketing organization. And I suggested the lens we use are is the lens of the six marketing roles that you define that a healthy marketing organization has. So I want to.

To start, I want to go back. mean, you reminded me today that we recorded an episode on this in September of 2018. So it was the first time that we covered the structure of these six rules of marketing. So I would encourage listeners that want to get the full in-depth on those six rules to listen to that episode. But I want to do a quick recap of those rules. And then I also want to just kind of get your thinking real quick as to

why we should think about a marketing organization through these roles in lieu of thinking about it through positions or skills or titles, which would be how normally you think about it with an org chart. So just, don’t want to spend a ton of time on that because I know we kicked the tires on that hard when we first did that episode, but I just want to hear you talk about that again. And then let’s do a kind of quick recap of the six roles. And then let’s talk about how AI changes this. So go, go straight, man.

Jeff (03:46.639)
So this concept of roles evolved from my time as a CMO. And anybody who’s been in marketing and professional services knows that marketing organizations are often very lame, particularly because most firms fall into the productivity

school of thought when it comes to marketing and marketing seen as a cost center versus a growth school. And we did an episode on that where marketing is a true revenue generator, not a lead generator that leads to revenue, but a revenue generator. And when you only have so much head count,

Thinking in terms of specific skills or functional titles is just way too limiting. You need not just generalists, but I would say multi-dimensional types of people on the team. And because when I talk about marketing, and we talked about this in that episode,

I’m talking capital marketing, not little marketing function, but marketing for the entire organization. And these roles do not necessarily have to fall into the marketing function, but they contribute significantly.

Jason Mlicki (05:23.064)
Okay.

Jeff (05:37.176)
to strategic impact on the organization and revenue generation of the growth school. So that’s kind of the thinking. So it’s utilitarian because I’m like, if I want to have this strategic impact, I need this type of input and contribution from somewhere in the organization. And that’s how the thinking evolved.

and I, and it’s important to delineate. I’m talking capital not just the function. It’s a broader way of thinking about it. It’s a, it’s a way of getting things done when you have limited resources.

Jason Mlicki (06:22.026)
OK, now that’s a really good reminder, the notion that it’s not about the marketing function. It’s about marketing as a revenue generator for the organization and that the roles are necessary for marketing to do that. But those roles don’t have to sit in the marketing function necessarily. And in fact, I would argue based on some of them, they probably never sit inside the marketing function, if I’m honest.

Jeff (06:48.821)
Yes, and these roles contribute to the three brand preference drivers. See what I did there?

Jason Mlicki (07:02.264)
Sorry listeners, as the idealist I’m trying to keep him from going there, but he’s gonna do it anyway because he’s the enforcer. He steamrolls me, that’s how that works, right? That’s how that works on the six-fold rules.

Jeff (07:12.3)
Like I said, I’m the straight man. I set you up.

Jason Mlicki (07:15.872)
Okay, okay. Okay. That was good. That was good. I like it. Okay. So let’s do this. Let’s, I’m just going to rattle off the six roles, the titles real fast, and then we’ll go back through each one and what their role is. the six roles are the strategist, the futurist, the enforcer, the idealist, the quant and the creative. So those are the six roles that you’ve defined for

Big marketing to drive revenue growth. Now let’s cycle through each one individually and just talk about the role briefly, what the role does, like what the role exists to do inside the company, the firm. So the strategist, let’s start with that. What does the strategist do?

Jeff (08:03.66)
So the strategist pulls it all together. And when I say strategist,

Jeff (08:18.442)
I’m really thinking in terms of go-to-market strategy, not marketing strategy alone, because in professional services, that go-to-market is really built up of three interrelated strategies, marketing strategy, sales strategy, and delivery strategy. So the strategist pulls all of those three things together in an integrated way

so that they harmonize. So one might say that the strategies translates all three of those into that cohesive plan. And I would argue augments it, because traditionally in professional services firms, those three types of strategies are made independent of one another.

Jason Mlicki (09:05.55)
Okay.

Jason Mlicki (09:17.57)
Yes.

Jeff (09:18.172)
generally maybe a practice drives, and that’s, that’s why it’s hurting cats. It’s why it’s hard to have a co-feet, a cohesive, go to market strategy because everybody’s following their own agenda, trying to hit their revenue goals. So the strategist sees beyond that. It sells the bigger vision and makes it happen.

Jason Mlicki (09:45.39)
Okay. And the futurist.

Jeff (09:48.895)
The futurist is closely related to the strategist, but the futurist is that great mind in the firm who has the time, the inclination, the passion and capacity to climb the mountain and look well beyond the horizon to where are we going? What’s the new era?

of consulting, accounting, law for our firm. You know, that kind of proverbial, where is the puck going to be so that a hockey player can skate where it’s going to be, not where it is, you know, misquote Wayne Gretzky. But the futurist takes that time and gets out of the

day-to-day business and helps set, you know, that breakout thinking that drives intellectual capital development and a deeper understanding of the market and where the future growth of the firm is coming from. And that can be done holistically, that could be done on a practice level basis. I would say that that role generally is coming out of the line.

or somebody with a line sales type of role, because they’re getting a lot of exposure to the practices and the clients.

Jason Mlicki (11:31.054)
Yeah. And I, I, I’m going to comment one second. I don’t think we mean a futurist in a crystal ball reader or a sage teller. It’s more someone exploring all the possible futures that will come. And that’s something we’ve had, they’ve had NIAC from jump talk a lot about, know, like, you know, future focused thinking, right? The enforcer, what’s the enforcer’s job? What’s your job, Jeff? The enforcer, other than dictating the brand preference framework at all terms.

Jeff (11:47.636)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jeff (12:00.67)
The…

Jason Mlicki (12:00.686)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Jeff (12:05.098)
The the enforcer is that role that starts and enables the organization to have good fights internally and a good fight is those arguments around what’s valuable to pursue what is not and How do we do two things one?

make a strategic decision. Oftentimes those are hard within firms because firms are political, right? There’s a lot of different agendas, incentives are not necessarily aligned. But the enforcer helps make those strategic decisions. But more important, I think, helps them to focus

and resolutely execute those decisions. Because where most firms go awry, they’ll make a decision, they’ll begin to execute, and the execution is not going according to their expectations. So they get up or change and go in other directions or go back to the default. The enforcer… Yes.

Jason Mlicki (13:27.97)
or a handful of people just choose not to execute, right? We agreed to execute, but I’m not going to do it.

Jeff (13:34.398)
Yeah, and the enforcer doesn’t allow that to happen. And generally, the enforcer, I think, should fall to a managing partner. That would be, I think, a typical role. But sometimes, because it’s political, they can’t confront. Sometimes, it’s a functional person, head of sales, head of marketing, that

sees across the business and can communicate and substantiate with business acumen and charisma and authority, legitimate authority, but also that charismatic authority about the future and the reason to stay focused. I think this is a critical role and it seldom exists in firms.

because of the BS of PS, right?

Jason Mlicki (14:34.614)
Yeah, I mean, honestly, I would argue it’s probably the most important of the six roles because because it is frequently lacking and as a result, it’s really hard to move the ball down the field, the proverbial ball down the field because there’s nobody to bring consensus. So, yeah, I agree. The fourth rule is the idealist and I’ll take a stab at it since I claimed I am the idealist for this podcast, which may not really be true.

I just used your, I like your phrase. said it reminds us why we’re here. keeps us focused on fulfilling the mission, living the values, delivering the brand promise. So it’s sort of like the individual that kind of sticks to the higher calling of, of what we’re trying to accomplish as a firm. so anything you want to add to that about the idealist?

Jeff (15:25.449)
It’s a critical role and as we’ll discuss shortly, think becoming even more critical for sure. And the thing that I really like about this role is it often is accompanied with naivete. I would say I was an idealist early on in my career and

Jason Mlicki (15:31.522)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff (15:54.776)
Firms can make fun or poo poo idealists sometimes, you know, for being naive. but I think it’s, it’s critical to have because it keeps us centered, particularly those firms that are wanting to create legacies and brands, right? It keeps us true to, to who we are. And if it’s done in the right way, people,

you know, are like, ooh, that kind of hurt the way he said that. But yeah, he’s right or she’s right. We are wandering from. Why we do what we do, because we need to hit some short term result, right? And we talked about this with Brian Caffarelli, you know, good revenue, bad revenue is an excellent example. The idealist would say, I know that’s a great deal short term, but

It’s not going to serve our interests long term. We got to say no.

Jason Mlicki (16:57.89)
Yeah. All right, the quant. So the fifth rule is the quant.

Jeff (17:02.919)
This is you, you’re the quant. You’re the quant. You’re not an idealist, you’re a No, you’re an ideological quant.

Jason Mlicki (17:05.229)
That’s probably more accurate.

I don’t know what that is, but sounds pretty cool.

Jeff (17:16.018)
No, to me, the quant is the most, I won’t say most critical. these are critical. It’s critical role because it makes all the other roles stronger, better, because it brings the data. It brings the insights to change the trajectory of a conversation or a strategic direction or whatever, but they’re just always.

thinking with data.

Jason Mlicki (17:50.904)
Yeah, like we could do a whole episode on the quant and just in general in terms of I would argue the quant is under fire all the time because no one ever wants to believe the data that they’re bringing to bear. And they’ll argue against the data kind of like, because you’re right. I wear the hat of the quant quite often in our client work. often that’s what happens. like, well, what?

The data is great, but it doesn’t really say what I want it to say, basically, is what’s being said. Like, that’s what it is.

Jeff (18:25.137)
Jason, you almost said verbatim right there what you said. Yeah, seven years ago. Yes, yes, almost verbatim. So you know, you know what? After we get off this call, you and I are gonna have a little coaching session. And I’m gonna teach you how to be an enforcer.

Jason Mlicki (18:29.142)
Yeah. Did I?

Several years ago. That’s hilarious. It’s Well, like I said. Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (18:46.081)
Okay.

Jason Mlicki (18:49.654)
No, no, no, no.

Jeff (18:51.022)
because you’re just lacking a little enforcer characteristics in order to drive that data story home.

Jason Mlicki (18:55.145)
oof oof

Jason Mlicki (19:02.382)
sounds that sounds horrible that sounds truly truly horrible what’s that

Jeff (19:06.714)
You know what’s so funny about that? You have no trouble being the enforcer when the camera’s off and you and I are having conversations.

Jason Mlicki (19:10.83)
That’s a point. Yeah, I Well, you know, I like to talk. Okay, and then the sixth the sixth role is the creative and We’ll argue about this for I’m sure a little bit like we did last time. So Fire away define the creative

Jeff (19:30.202)
Yes, we have differences on it. Actually, I think we agree. For me, the creative is that person, and this is a rare role. Most people think of creative as just straight design. In my terms, make it pretty. You argued about that in our last conversation. Yeah, yeah. But the major purpose is

Jason Mlicki (19:52.384)
good one again.

Jeff (19:59.742)
making these big ideas understandable and storytelling and visuals are really important to explaining these ideas. And most of us analytical people aren’t good at that. And we need these created people that can bring those quantitative stories to life.

Jason Mlicki (20:29.531)
Yeah, no, actually we’re in agreement on that role. I think your definition is quite good. I do think it is the people that know how to tell a compelling story and know how to make stuff understandable. The only thing I amended when we did this last time was just this idea that beautiful and understandable or not disconnected that it should be both. And really, really, you should be striving to make everything that you put into the world both.

Beautiful and understandable. OK, so those are the six roles as you have defined them. You have defined them. I can’t put myself in there. You define these. Now let’s talk about how AI is impacting these roles. Has it changed any of them? Has it eliminated the need for any of them?

How can it help people that are in these roles? Has it created the need for new roles? So let’s have that discussion now. I think maybe, well, the way I did it anyway, is I went through it one at a time and said, how does AI help this role? And then I asked the question of whether or not AI could replace any of these roles.

You know, I came to the conclusion that it cannot. I’d be curious to see if you agree with that. In fact, I even used AI to kind of explore that, to try to figure out whether or not AI could replace any of these six roles entirely. And the conclusion that I drew from that was no. I do think AI can change the nature of these roles and can help people that are in these roles do those roles better. But I’m not convinced that AI can, can full stop replace any one of these six roles.

So maybe we start there. Do you have a differing opinion on that? Do you see any of these roles at risk? Or maybe at risk is the wrong term. know, rendered obsolete. You know, we don’t need this role anymore because AI takes away the need for it.

Jeff (22:33.273)
way I have been thinking about this…

Jeff (22:39.618)
And I am so glad we did that AI series two years ago. That was a really robust conversation and so useful. And when I look back on it now, I’m like, man, that seems so rudimentary about the impact. Because we were talking about a lot of

Jason Mlicki (23:03.127)
I think it was.

Jeff (23:07.619)
these things and we’ve just made these leaps since then. So my thinking just continues to evolve on this. But in terms of these roles, I’ve been thinking about them along kind of three lines. The first one is AI is just a tool. And it’s a tool that right now is being looked at primarily from a productivity perspective.

And I’m so tired of seeing these reports coming out about how AI is being used in marketing around content development and ideation, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? All these kinds of tactical things. I think that’s great. They help, right? They speed things up. It’s a pro-duck tivity tool. No doubt. Right? So in, in every respect, I think they’ve increased the productivity.

Jason Mlicki (23:38.99)
All

Jeff (24:07.373)
of all of these rows to a large degree. Depending on the role, maybe more. So a creative and a quant, maybe even more so, they’ve increased productivity. I don’t know. So that’s the first one. It’s a tool for productivity. Second.

Jeff (24:30.102)
I think AI is a mindset changing technology too. How can we think differently now that we have this AI capacity to augment our thinking? And for the strategist and the futurist, and I would say even the enforcer, that’s a major…

upgrade, but those roles have to kind of free their minds in order to apply AI to the roles. And then the third way I’m going to save to the end, because I think the most important impact of AI will be my third way of thinking about this.

Jason Mlicki (25:27.79)
All right, so let me recap. One is that, well, real quick, I want to make a comment. So when we’re saying AI, I believe we’re talking in the language of machine learning right now, which is really what most artificial intelligence that’s being used in the general business public is. It’s essentially machine learning. This can be defined a million ways. That’s how I looked at this right now. I think you could obviously make the argument that if

someone achieves true AGI, artificial general intelligence, then clearly that could step into all kinds of roles in an organization. But I’m not going to say I’m on top of how likely that is, but I don’t believe it’s going to happen anytime soon, even though they keep claiming it’s going to happen in three minutes or whatever. It’s kind of like Google Car. When they demoed it 15 years ago, it’s going to be here in three years, and we’re still kind of waiting for that.

So I wanted to kind of put that caveat in place, but I want to recap what you said. one is that because of that AI as a machine learning tool has mostly been about productivity so far, making anybody that does any of these tasks more productive. And I had that, I had lists of those things. think about like for the strategist, I know I use it all the time as a strategist. And it’s like, I call it like a team of on-demand analysts that can just.

run out into the world and do a whole bunch of research and discovery for me much faster and more rapidly than I could ever do on my own. Same kind of use case for the futurist, right? It’s a great thought partner, just exploring different questions. What if this played out, what would happen? What would be the repercussions of that? And it’s not necessarily an answer engine at all. It’s more just a thought partner. It’s something to explore and get your thinking and have…

have someone to have a conversation with, maybe when you don’t have anybody to have a conversation with on that topic, either at that moment or just in general, maybe you feel isolated in the firm. And I think that does happen to people that are futurists, right? Like there’s like not a lot of future focused thinkers inside of a lot of professional services firms. So they’re kind of on an island. So I think that, so first use cases is productivity to do these things more efficiently, more effectively. And then you said the second use case was?

Jason Mlicki (27:47.304)
to differently, right? To think in a different way than you might have thought before. Can you give an example of that? I tried to give examples of the first. What are some examples of the second?

Jeff (28:06.167)
The immediate one that comes to mind is the what if. That big kind of, and you kind of alluded to it all right, what if. Or if this, then what and why. And to me, it really enables that.

Toyota approach to the five whys, right? You just keep expanding, expanding and exploring. And because it really amplifies, and I think this is true particularly of really smart people like you have in professional services firms, accelerates that just in time learning. But instead of a,

how-to type of learning, it’s a what-if type of learning. And those are very different. So much of quote unquote thought leadership and content marketing is how-to type of thinking. And that’s important because we need to put plans in action and get stuff done.

Jason Mlicki (29:11.074)
Yeah.

Jeff (29:33.173)
But we also need that time to think about what if. And I really like AI for that. But as we talked about with known well, when we had Peter and Courtney on, we were talking about what’s gonna be really important for the humans is to see

Jason Mlicki (29:39.212)
Yeah.

Jason Mlicki (29:53.314)
Yeah.

Jeff (30:01.449)
what AI doesn’t see. AI is really good at identifying patterns, but what the humans need to do is see the pattern that’s not there.

Jason Mlicki (30:14.412)
Yeah, if you remember in that one episode we did, I talked a lot about that movie about the gamer turned race car driver and the scene where the technology delivers a pattern and he breaks the pattern again and again and again, because he sees that everyone’s using the pattern, but he can win if he goes off the path. And so that’s what the human does. know, I was relisting to our episode on differentiation and I was thinking about

I gave a comment in there that I think I want to change. said that Google changed the world because it enabled you to literally find a needle in a haystack. And I think what AI is doing is it’s… So we went from having this problem, like you have a question, you have a problem and you’re trying to make sense of it. And you had to literally find the solution buried in this haystack, right? And it was super hard.

What’s happened as a result of kind of the internet phenomenon in general is now there’s 50 million haystacks and you can’t make sense of the haystacks, let alone find the needle at all. And I feel like AI is like this layer sitting on top of, of the internet. It’s sitting on top of everything we built that helps you make sense of all this stuff. So I don’t know where I’m going with that other than one thing I think that’s interesting is there’s this conversation that’s come up recently for me where.

there were sort of like digital or cloud native firms that were born in the cloud, right? And they behave and operate differently than firms that came out of like legacy technology and then tried to migrate to the cloud. did some work with Google. It’s a long story, but you know, we talked a lot with, we learned a lot from them about that. There was just totally different behaviors in those two types of companies. And I think the same thing’s playing out is going to play out with AI.

You’re going to have AI native firms that are born from now forward, and they’re going to operate and function differently than a firm that was born in the cloud era or before that’s now adopting AI. And to your point, I think the AI native firms are going to have an inherent advantage on this second use case you described, because they’re going to look at it as just another tool that helps them think differently.

Jason Mlicki (32:39.086)
So kind of a meandering way to get to my point, but I got there.

Jeff (32:44.65)
That wasn’t meandering at all. That’s brilliant. You summarized more eloquently than I did what I was thinking, right? And I actually have a segmentation model on cloud that is described exactly what you just said. I think today I may go back and say, all right, let’s use this same kind of model.

Jason Mlicki (33:07.053)
Yeah.

Jeff (33:14.877)
and apply it to AI and what does that look like? Because that’s exactly right.

Jason Mlicki (33:24.034)
Yeah. And I mean, who knows the AI native organization may be much lighter than even the cloud organization. You would argue cloud organizations were much lighter than their predecessors, right? Lighter, mean, head count and whatever. So one thing that jumped out, this is funny because you said we did this last time. I said, you’re missing some roles. I actually feel like there is a couple of roles. There are a couple of roles missing.

And one that came to mind for me was a technologist. You know, that sounds ridiculous. Like we have the quant, but I feel like the quant is about the data, understanding the information and how to make it accessible, usable, and get it shared and get it acted upon. But I do think that particularly with this kind of like rise of AI, seems like everything is technology dependent now in marketing, right? So anything you want to do.

It’s driving the means of marketing, the consumption of marketing output, the measurement of performance. Everything relies on this vast network of technology systems. And it’s like, you need somebody that’s on top of that. That’s sort of constantly looking at what’s going on and what’s out there. How can we use it? How can we use it better? Are we using it the right way? Do we have governance? Do we have rules in place? Someone who’s sort of pushing that conversation. Because I think left to their own devices, a lot of firms,

They’re not going explore the stuff. They’re not going to go spend time with some of the new technologies that they could use unless someone’s pushing them there and nudging them there. So that was something that really jumped out to me as something that’s sort of like, huh, maybe there should be a role for that in this. Thoughts?

Jeff (35:13.587)
think you’re spot on.

with this caveat or clarification.

Jason Mlicki (35:18.668)
Yeah.

Jeff (35:22.907)
Absolutely positively, need a technologist.

When I think about these roles, they generally sit on top of a day-to-day functional role. So I may have a technologist on my team to run marketing automation or CRM or marketing ops or whatever it is, because I need that, you know, functionally and operationally as a marketing small small

Jason Mlicki (35:43.074)
Yeah.

Jeff (36:01.456)
marketing. But generally, if I’m putting one of those people on my team, I’m not hiring just for the technology. I’m hiring for the role that sits on top of that. And that person is either going to be a quant, a futurist, or a strategist. Generally,

I see them combining either the quant or the strategist because they’re systems thinkers.

The best technology people are systems thinkers and system thinkers cascade to me into strategy and analysis. So your point is well taken. I just delineate between the functional role and these broader big marketing roles.

Jason Mlicki (37:00.782)
So interesting comment I want to explore with you real quick. So then does that mean that you might have multiple people with the same roles? You might have multiple strategists, multiple futurists that come from different functional roles, hence they bring a different perspective? Or are these discrete?

Jeff (37:22.619)
the former. If you have the riches of multiple roles, you are really blessed. Not all firms have those riches. I’m happy to get one, but if I had two or three futurists or two or three quants or something like that, man, that augments

the strategic impact I can have as a leader within the firm, assuming that we have an enforcer role. I can’t have three futurists running every which direction with their view of the world. We need to coalesce around some vision of the future and execute against it.

Jason Mlicki (38:21.642)
Same holds for the idealist, right? I mean, if you have a team of idealists, nothing ever gets done. So someone has to be there to put structure around it and move the, again, move the proverbial football down the field. And it falls on the enforcer and the strategist, right? To figure that out. Say, Hey, look, like, what are we actually going to do? I understand what you’re saying. That’s the purpose. That’s the mission. That’s the vision. want to chase all that, but what are we actually going to get done by end of this year? And what does that look like?

So, okay. Do we want to say more about, yeah.

Jeff (38:54.534)
Yeah. And Jason, I would just want to add one more thing on that. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I have to work in the brand preference drivers here. No, no. The important thing about these roles, the futurist, the strategist, and the enforcer, is the concept of the performance envelope, right? We’re here right now.

Jason Mlicki (39:05.078)
You gotta go back to the three drivers. mean, least four times an episode, right?

Jeff (39:23.654)
but we want to get here, what are the steps in the evolution of the firm in terms of the capabilities and the markets and the building of the brand relevance in order to get there? So if the futurist says, here’s where the puck’s going to be, the strategist says, okay, here are the steps we’re going to take to evolve the firm in order to compete five years from now.

in those markets and then the enforcer keeps us on task in getting to that futurist perspective strategically.

Jason Mlicki (40:05.198)
Okay. I’ll roll with that. Thought leadership. I’m just going to throw that in because if you have to repeat the brand model four times an episode, I got to say thought leadership at least three times. I want to make sure I don’t run out of time. Now, okay. What I want to do is I want to transition. So I want to get to your third. I don’t think we need to kick the tires harder on how AI can be used to do these tasks better. think everybody…

that fills these rules has already experimented and knows that, right? They’ve already tested AI’s ability to strip away unnecessary information and shorten content or assist with analyzing and reconciling data or whatever. And they found its abilities and its strengths and weaknesses. But let’s get to this third use case. So if use case two was thinking differently, what’s use case three? Or what’s, I guess, change three? Maybe I don’t know what it is.

Jeff (41:02.245)
think AI has the potential to redefine what I call the IC triad.

Jason Mlicki (41:13.994)
boy.

Jeff (41:15.007)
And that IC triad, if you will, is that integration of sales, marketing, and delivery in order to go to market. And these roles, their responsibilities, and how they’re perceived within an organization differ.

by the marketing school of thought, right? Productivity school versus growth. How much the line in that expert knowledge is valued vis-a-vis the value of a marketer or a salesperson, right? So that IC triad made up of those three functions,

can be really dysfunctional, inefficient when firms are trying to commercialize intellectual capital. Because that IC triad develops the thought leadership or intellectual capital, translates it into solution, and then has to take it to market and communicate the value of it. So that’s the IC triad. I think that

Jason Mlicki (42:32.899)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff (42:42.965)
AI has the potential to just totally change that operating.

Jeff (42:53.147)
And I don’t know how, but let’s use, for example, commercialization of a solution. The way most solutions are taken to market, we have one successful client engagement, let’s brand it and put a whole marketing plan behind it and take this thing to market. And we know those things fail constantly. And that happens

because marketing will not step in and say this is a bad idea. It isn’t well thought out. There’s not a large potential addressable market for it. They trust the expertise of the line person and they waste all this time and money taking that to market.

Jeff (43:43.554)
With AI, that does not have to happen. The line person conceivably could develop a commercialization strategy to develop and launch that product or solution without any marketing input whatsoever, because most marketing in professional service is just a comm function.

It doesn’t have that strategic commercialization of a traditional product firm. So why do I need marketing for anything like that if I’m the line?

Alternatively, if I’m a marketer and the line is not producing thought leadership or doing much innovation, does AI equip me to really understand the business and move my game into the realm of the CPA or the JD or the IT consultant?

in a way where I’m driving the thought leadership agenda more so than the line. I’ve seen, and I have executive friends, this is a great example, who are using chat GPT for legal advice and going to their lawyers and guiding their lawyers arguments in litigation.

Right? And think, just think about that. Is that an ideal model? But I don’t, I don’t know. I just hurt my knee. I went to chat GPT and YouTube, self-diagnosed, developed my own physical therapy, started treating myself. And then I went to an orthopedist two months later and I actually talked to two orthopedists.

Jeff (45:50.757)
Neither one of those orthopedists told me anything I didn’t already know or was already doing in order to treat my knee. And I think those are just two kind of like tangible examples of really deep expertise driven industries. And I’m not saying I would rely on ChatGPT to assess.

my heart or something like that. But those are just, this is the way it’s building. So my point is, marketers can move into the line, the line can move into marketing, and they start to blur. So I question what are gonna be the roles, the responsibilities, the goals of these functions when the combination is really set up to

define, communicate, and deliver value.

So if I’m thinking about that IC triad and sales marketing and delivery, how do I define, communicate and deliver value? And I overlay AI on that. I’m thinking about things in a totally different way.

Jason Mlicki (47:13.262)
So it’s a really interesting thought experiment. And it comes back to your idea that those three functions are artificially created by organizations when there’s really just one thing that’s client experience. And I would suggest what you’re arguing is that all those things could blur and become one thing. That marketing, sales, and delivery could just be one thing.

And AI enables that to be much more viable than ever. know, something that comes to mind is like,

Could AI be the whole delivery function? Could a firm, as a thought experiment, could a firm literally just exist of marketing and selling and have no delivery, have no line whatsoever? The line is AI. Or vice versa. Could a firm have just professionals and have literally no marketing function whatsoever and AI does all the marketing?

I would argue this third concept, as you’re describing it, is probably not viable or likely right now, but certainly conceivable in the very near future. There may be firms trying to do this in some way, or form. Probably are, in reality. Because it comes back to some of our differentiation stuff that we talked about, this idea that, well, you can

turned yourself into what you believe is a substitute of an expert pretty quickly. You did some work with Chatchie PT and you felt that you were comparable in expertise to talented orthopedists. And that’s kind of what we talked about, is that idea that it’s a substitute. So it’s a really interesting thought experiment. don’t know how…

Jason Mlicki (49:22.442)
It feels like maybe what you’re describing is the AI native firm, right? It’s the firm that’s born in the AI era that’s born and looks differently because of when and how it was born versus a firm that has got 30 years in it already. Morphing into that seems very painful and maybe not hugely likely.

Jeff (49:47.446)
And it has the legacy of the cash cow, right? It has to protect the core. The innovators dilemma for sure. But my idea is build on some of yours. The first one is your term about a lighter organization. Every firm wants to get lighter, do more with less. So

Jason Mlicki (50:10.158)
Yeah.

Jeff (50:15.402)
That’s a trend that will continue and support this. The other thing, I don’t know what episode it was on when we were discussing thought leadership. We had this discussion about thinker sellers and seller doers. To me, the IC Triad,

Jason Mlicki (50:34.786)
Mm-hmm.

Jeff (50:42.506)
is really the structure to manage what I call the thinker, seller, doer dynamic, right? Where the line is the product and the line is R &D and product innovation. And it’s selling it in most organizations, because most mid-sized firms don’t have professional

Jason Mlicki (50:54.648)
Yeah.

Jeff (51:11.526)
sales organizations, right? And they’re doing the work. So that thinker, seller, doer is already doing a lot of that lifting. They’re just not really effective at it, right? They fall in love with their solutions. They don’t talk about benefits, right? They’re not good at sales or whatever. And I’m not saying these functions are going away. I’m just saying, think about it.

Jason Mlicki (51:13.528)
No.

Jason Mlicki (51:37.592)
Yeah.

Jeff (51:39.174)
And I think those two things are really leading me down this path. There would be a third one, and I’ll put a link to this. Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Andreessen’s venture capital firm, had a great post on new pricing in a world of AI. And they talked about this concept of labor as a service.

Jason Mlicki (51:52.322)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff (52:05.522)
in how you replace an hourly wage with a result, how do you pay for an hour worth of time versus how do you pay for a delivered result or outcome that AI can produce? And I was like, boom, right. Think about that. Fascinating. And to me, that supports, again, this where can we

commercialize, define value, communicate value, and deliver that value in a lighter way with this model.

Jason Mlicki (52:43.49)
Well, I don’t think, well, that the comment about price, I don’t think any of that’s new, right? I mean, there have been people on our podcast, including myself, talking about the need for firms to pivot out of selling inputs to selling outcomes and outputs, right? That’s not new information. I just think AI for the first time is actually stressing some firms that are

literally using sale of inputs as a crutch to forcing them to change. They didn’t have to change, but now they really actually have to change. Marketing organizations, marketing agencies had to change a long time ago. Law firms are clinging to the hourly billable hour like to the end, but it’s going to hit them now. Same with accounting firms, same with even IT services firms. know, whenever demand exceeds supply,

You don’t have to be creative or thoughtful in your pricing model. And now that that’s going to invert when there’s not enough demand to go around, all of a sudden, you’ve got to think differently about your pricing model. that’s not necessarily new thinking. It’s just there’s a new stressor that’s forcing action for the first time in some of those firms. How would are you?

Jeff (54:03.599)
And there’s clear line of sight, particularly for the buyers of those services. If you think of a call center where you used to be billed by call, and now AI is not answering the phone, but resolving an issue, how do you price for that and get value out of that?

It’s those type of things where there’s clear line of sight to the labor that’s involved. Most labor in professional services firms is black box. I don’t know what you’re doing. You’re doing some kind of analysis. Yeah, yeah.

Jason Mlicki (54:47.394)
some kind of vague, vague thing. OK, well, let’s take this to wrap. I think your third is a very interesting thought experiment. I think that’s kind of where I would lump that right now is rethinking the very nature of the firm in an AI era, which is a challenge for everyone to think about is, the whole nature of our firm need to change?

All right, let’s do a kind of quick wrap. Quick, what should people do now? Like what should they do right now? And then close it out here.

Jeff (55:29.524)
Well, in my mind, these roles are as important now as they ever were. And if you haven’t shifted your thinking from a functional, small marketing skills, way of thinking to this role and strategic impact, you need to change that. Second thing is,

You need to delineate within your firm. Who’s filling these roles? Who should fill these roles? Do they know they’re filling the roles? What kind of output and results am I getting from these roles? So actually look at them and start to measure them and manage them because they will have a huge impact on your firm. And then

I think the final thing is understanding and assigning those roles. Make sure your firm is equipping those roles with the AI as tool to make them as productive as possible and augment them in those responsibilities. But also to your great point that AI native type of mindset, start building

a new way of thinking within your firm.

Jason Mlicki (57:01.25)
Yeah, mean, your third use essentially is asking firms to reinvent themselves and rethink the entire nature of their firm. And there are firms that are being born right now that are doing that from the get-go. And now you’re competing with them. So you better buckle up and get ready, right? And you better lean on that futurist to help you figure out how you compete in that new reality.

You know, on the flip of that, at the very other end of that, I, know, it’s funny, my, my, my notes coming into this were much more tactical than where we ended up, but most firms I don’t think have a, have a very cohesive like strategy for AI in marketing in general. There’s just still a lot of just kind of like people playing around with free versions of chat GPT and kind of see what they can do. So

I think that would be my advice is if you think about use case one, just trying to do what it is you do better, you better get a wrap around that and figure out which tools you want to use for which tasks, who’s using them, what they cost and how you’ll determine if they’re helping you or not. And that’s a real basic fundamental thing. But in that use case, mean, you need to spend time, meaningful time on use case three, figuring that out. Don’t disagree with that. But until that’s figured out, you got to run the business, right?

Use case one is important to getting there. So don’t lose sight of that, I guess, is my point. Don’t lose sight of the here and now while you think through this kind of future scenario and how quickly you need to get there.

Jeff (58:39.11)
I think an easy way to think about that, Jason, because that point is very well taken, is to look at it on an individual basis. How can I increase individual productivity in use of this tool, whether that’s with the generative models that we’re all using now? We all have our favorite AI tool, so individually. Second, functionally, every

piece of software you have supporting a function, whether it’s HubSpot or Salesforce or Dynamics or whatever, or bacon AI in this to automate workflows and analyze and clean up data. Look at it functionally. Ask your functional leaders, how can you get more out of your functional investment in this technology? And then third, organizationally.

And that’s the reinvention. That’s what the known wells are doing. How do you begin to analyze that data that transcends those functional databases in order to reinvent the business? But that’s a big lift. But looking at the individual and the functional, you could do that today.

Jason Mlicki (59:52.588)
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. All right, man, this was a great discussion. Let’s take it to wrap. We’ll talk to you next time.

Jeff (01:00:04.305)
See you, bye.