Editor's note: Joe Rydholm can be reached at joe@quirks.com.
Keeping pace with the changes wrought by technology used to be viewed as a means of getting ahead in your career. These days, thanks to AI, it’s almost a matter of survival. While some job impacts are already being felt, others may be decades down the road. What should you do in the meantime? Two recent books offer helpful insights and advice on harnessing technology to your benefit.
AI, of course, is the main source of stress for a lot of workers these days, and not just those in so-called knowledge industries like marketing research. With his book “Welcome to AI” (Harvard Business Press), David L. Shrier, a technology expert and professor at Imperial College Business School, delivers an accessible, big-picture overview of the current AI landscape. It’s subtitled “a human guide to artificial intelligence” but I would change “human” to “worker’s,” as much of the book centers around how AI is impacting jobs and careers and how it is likely to do so in the future.
An early chapter on related concepts – generative AI; supervised vs. unsupervised learning; expert systems – concisely lays out some of the main ideas associated with AI, giving the reader an easy-to-digest sense of how we got where we are before the book pivots to its employment-focused assessments of AI.
It’s early days, so some of his musings are just that – well-informed guesses on how things might go or which types of careers might be most or least impacted by AI. Naturally, his view is that jobs that involve direct human contact (he cites mainly health care-related positions) won’t be easily replaced by AI, nor will those who install or maintain energy systems or whose work requires or benefits from a high degree of emotional intelligence.
The upshot for marketing researchers? In Shrier’s view, no one will emerge unscathed. Many of an insight worker’s core duties – such as finding and making sense of all forms of data and information – are ripe for automation but I kept coming back to his points about emotional intelligence and human contact, two factors that researchers are well-versed in, as potential buffers capable of staving off obliteration by AI.
Based on its title, you might think the next book, “The Consumer Insights Revolution” (ReThink Press), goes heavy on the AI but aside from some expected mentions of it, authors Steve Phillips, Ryan Barry, Stephan Gans and Kate Schardt have kept their content mercifully light on AI.
Instead, their focus is on PepsiCo’s journey to organize (or “digitalize,” as the authors refer to it) the company’s vast troves of research data and findings with help from Zappi’s technology. (Phillips is CEO and co-founder of Zappi and Barry is the firm’s president. Gans is PepsiCo’s SVP, chief consumer insights officer and Schardt is PepsiCo’s VP, global insights capabilities and partnerships.)
At the outset it feels like it could be a potential commercial in book form where the PepsiCo authors wax poetic about Zappi and though there is certainly a positive tone throughout, the grounding of the majority of the book in the experiences of PepsiCo researchers (and those of other Zappi clients) overcomes any fears of self-promotion and instead ends up giving readers an enlightening peek into the insights function of one of the world’s best-known brands.
And while of course the Zappi authors would no doubt prefer that you use their platform, there is enough information here (a good half of the book) on why and how an internal research department can and should assemble and integrate its various information sources to make it worth reading. I found the section of anecdotes from Gans and Schardt about introducing the platform to sometimes-skeptical internal audiences particularly interesting. And, as a team, the four authors make a convincing case for the value of marketing research and for the ability of researchers to use technology to assemble and disseminate the strategic insights that truly make a difference to their organizations.