Web3 CMO Stories

AI At Work, Humans In Charge | S5 E45

• Joeri Billast & Sérgio Ferreira • Season 5

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A packed Lisbon room. A candid conversation with Sérgio Ferreira, Partner at EY and Jo Smets, President, CCLBL & CEO, BluePanda. And a straight shot of strategy on how AI shifts from cost-cutting to true growth. We take you inside real examples—finance, HR, retail, and contact centers—where automation speeds the work while people make the judgment. The result is faster decisions, 24/7 service, and new operating models that put digital assistants in every pocket and at every counter.

We dig into the trust problem head-on. When “good enough” AI content floods the feed, the edge moves to teams that show their process and protect their voice. You’ll hear why we frame AI as augmented intelligence, not artificial intelligence: use machines to gather, draft, and summarize, then apply human editing, taste, and accountability. That mindset becomes essential as we move through three phases: assistants that co-create, agentic AI that works autonomously, and a near future where leaders manage mixed teams of people and digital employees.

Customer behavior is changing just as fast. People seek direct answers, not links, which upends SEO and demands distinct expertise, structure, and signals to surface in AI results. We share how to adapt content strategy, build AI literacy and fluency across teams, and maintain strong consulting value by compressing research time while doubling down on human creativity. We also tackle sustainability pressures with pragmatic optimism—acknowledging energy and water costs while highlighting how AI accelerates breakthroughs in materials, medicine, and clean energy.

If this conversation helps you reframe your roadmap, follow and share the show with a friend who leads marketing or product. Leave a quick review to support the work, and grab The Future CMO on Amazon for deeper playbooks. Most of all, don’t wait for the future to lead you—lead the future.

This episode was recorded at the EY headquarters in Lisbon on October 29, 2025. Read the blog article, and show notes here: https://webdrie.net/ai-at-work-humans-in-charge/



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Sérgio:

So our organograms at our companies are going to be with people and digital agents working side by side. I think this is going to be the second phase because we are going to have, for instance, a major controller, a financial controller that is a digital employee instead of being you.

Joeri:

Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CM Asteries podcast. My name is Judy Vilas and I'm your podcast host. And in today's special episode, you hear live conversation recorded at EYLisbon during the AI and marketing event that we did yesterday, Wednesday in October 29th. It was organized with the Belgian-Luxembourg Portuguese Chamber of Commerce. And I sat down with Sergio Ferreira at EYPortugal to discuss how AI is transforming business from efficiency to growth, from automation to human augmentation. You'll also hear some great audience questions about TrustChops creativity and the future of marketing in the AI era. You will also hear the voice of Jos Metz, who is the president of the CC LBL and also the founder of Blue Panda. This conversation captures what the future CMO is really about, how modern leaders use AI to amplify, not replace the human elements. And of course, if you want to know more, check out my book, The Future CMO, available on Amazon. Let's dive in. Great to talk to you, Sergio, because you know we are here also to talk a bit about the book and link it to AI. The example you gave with Google Notebook LM was really spot on because people ask me, Yuri, how is it possible that you write a book in two months compared to my first book? I took three years to write it. And actually, you gave the answer in the beginning. So part of that was I am Mark Schaefer, a friend of mine, he's a personal branding expert, wrote a lot of books, he said to me, But you have a keynote, you have so many podcast conversations, you have the content. So what I did was I used Google Notebook LM to make sense of it and to give me a starting point. Now that said, yeah, you show these tools, like Google Notebook LM, like HeyGen, like Canado Banana. How are the companies that you are seeing in your role as partner at EY are they using AI more like an efficiency tool, or are they also starting to use it like a growth tool to grow their business?

Sérgio:

Good question. It depends on the company and the leadership. Most of the companies are pressured to find efficiencies in order to make their PL better. And so it's much easier to reduce costs with tools that is just applying them to make things go faster. So most of the things that we are seeing today are on what we call the optimization space that you are keeping the same operating model, you are keeping the same products in service, so you are not really transforming anything, but you are bringing AI into the processes, and so you are speeding those processes. For example, you go to the finance department and you go to invoices, and instead of having people collecting invoices and extracting information, you get patients doing it automatically. If you go to HR, the example is that you are receiving a large number of curriculum from people that is applying to jobs in your company. And until now, you had to have people reading those CVs and selecting them. Now you have machines reading the CVs, classifying them, and selecting the most appropriate for those jobs. So again, you are speeding up the process, you are not really changing it. If you go to marketing, the same. So until now, it was not possible to do any kind of video about a campaign, a marketing campaign. If you want to do something that was comparable to what I just showed you, you had to hire the advertising company, you had to do some moving shots in the street, interviewing people, getting information. Now you can do it at home just by clicking and talking with the machine. So this is the kind of things that we are seeing, and it's more on the optimization side. Regarding growth, some of the biggest ones that have started earlier and tested it before, they are going into some areas of innovation and also of new operating models. And so, for instance, we are seeing these companies on the retail space that are creating new ways of delivering services to their customers and transforming the way they do things. For example, if you go today to a store of Vorten, what you will see is that some of the people giving service to us when we go into the stores, they have tablets or smartphones in their hands. They have the digital assistant inside those tablets. And they can speak to this assistant in order to help. For instance, if you go there and say, I just bought a Samsung of 55 inches 37 days ago and it's broken. It was almost impossible for a person to know what was the kind of service level agreement that the customer will have immediately. They will have to go to a computer and try to find it. Now they just ask, and in five seconds, they have the answer because the machine was trained on their operational manual. So these are the things that they are transforming. The contact center is the same. Until a few months ago, the service on the contact center. Now they are doing 24-7, mostly because they have machines working when there are no humans at the contact center. These are the things we are seeing. This is bringing more growth because when you are attending 24 by 7, you are selling more.

Joeri:

Yeah. Another point of AI, and I'm discussing in my book, is AI noise and trust. If anyone can use an AI tool to create content and video, what can we as a consumer or as a client still believe that it is true? And that's one of the problems. And the other thing is how to stand out if everyone can use the same tools.

Sérgio:

So, first of all, I think that we all use technological tools, and that doesn't make us smaller or less valuable humans. And I don't think that if you use these tools the right way, it's going to make anything wrong to us. Regarding most specific your question, we cannot face the problem of becoming digital lazy humans. Just because they create faster and maybe better than us, we don't do nothing. We just do copy-paste. That's the problem that we are seeing today. We go to ChatGPT or Google Gemini or Cloud from Anthropic. We just do a prompt, it gives us an answer, and we just copy and paste. That is the problem. So I think that our work starts there. As the editors and as curators of information, there is a human in the loop that makes that human. They produce much faster than us. So it's almost impossible to compete with them. I think I can say they are smarter than us, they are faster than us, and we cannot compete with them on those spectrums. So we can bring the humanity side of being humans. And I think that being human in this era is not a bug, it's really our biggest feature and most valuable one. And so we just have to adapt a new way of work. We use them to create faster, as you did. So you produce a book now in two months. But it's your book. So they did produce the content, but then you edit it, you curated, you made it your own. You just add the help of making it faster to create some of the content, the organization, summarization of the things that you'd like.

Joeri:

Exactly. That's also the point I like to make that AI is there to assist you, not to replace you, because people talk about AI-generated content. This is indeed noise, you know, opposed on LinkedIn or an ad made by AI. But in my case, it's my content. AI assisted me.

Sérgio:

You made it yours.

Joeri:

Then I just reworked it. And then it's interesting because you mentioned organizations. Do you feel like it's more a people's story or a tech story when you see that only 25% of CMOs has a strategy for AI?

Sérgio:

Yeah.

Joeri:

So what do you see it's going on? It's more like about the tech or about the people.

Sérgio:

I like to think about concepts because they help us on seeing correctly the future. Most of us now use AI as two letters that mean something. The problem is that maybe you should use AI not as artificial intelligence, but as augmented intelligence. So it's not only about tech, not only about people, it's about merging technology with people. And that's why I think we should start using augmented intelligence. We can augment ourselves and our cognitive abilities if we use these tools. And it has to become normal. Some people are afraid of using it because maybe they think that it's going to replace them. I think that it only will replace us if we allow it, because we became lazy digitals. So you don't copy and paste, but you use the power of AI to create faster. Now maybe you can write three or four or five books a year instead of just one. And that's the marvelous things that we can have with AI. And the content, from my understanding, can be even better. The quality of what we are experiencing companies, and even with my own experience, is that today I'm doing things that are better now than were before I was using AI. Because there were things that I was not a specialist, and I didn't know enough about it in order to write correctly about it. Now I have a specialist in my pocket. I think that we have 1,000 PhDs in our smartphone and in our pocket. We just need to know how to use them correctly.

Joeri:

How I see it is like I had a box full of puzzle pieces, and AI is very good in seeing patterns. As a human, we don't see these patterns. That's actually what helps. Now the audience can also ask questions if they're ready for it. It's going so fast. Look about the role for an entrepreneur or a CMO. They have AI is there. How you see this evolving in a few years? What is the place that AI will take? I gave a keynote for Lisbon entrepreneurs about using AI as your co-founder. So it's possible. But I'm curious to what your thoughts.

Sérgio:

Let me try to organize the way of thinking so that it makes it easier to understand. So today I think that we are on the first phase of this developer is that we as humans are using these tools as assistants. So I think this is the first phase. So use them as a tool in order to create faster content or to help us brainstorming or creating visual or video content much faster. The second part is what I call the agentic AI. Besides asking things and they are answering us, we are going to have some autonomy on these agents. They are going to become digital collaborators or digital employees. So our organograms at our companies are going to be with people and digital agents working side by side. I think this is going to be the second phase because we are going to have, for instance, an HR controller, a financial controller that is a digital employee instead of being a human. We train him, he knows how to do things, and he will do it autonomously. The third one is a skill that we need on the third phase to do, is that we are becoming boss of agents. So instead of being leading people, we also lead people with empathy, but we also have teams that are digital collaborators. And this is what we call the Frontier Firm. That is a firm that is leading on the edge of having digital employees in digital collaborators working with us side by side, and this will be the near future.

Joeri:

Absolutely. Sergio, but we have a question from the audience.

Sérgio:

We just know them through TV or social media. So, what is really the difference of seeing an avatar creating content that amuses or creates knowledge for us, or if it's a human. So that's why I'm saying I'm controversial. What we are seeing just through a smartphone in the screen, and actually it's digital. And what we are looking for is entertainment. Let me just put it in a different way. If we go to the US, the number of people above 65 years old that live alone is huge. Until we had this kind of agents, they were alone. Now they have a digital person that talks with them and they don't feel alone. So we are experiencing times where things that maybe seem not to be very human, maybe they are becoming more human because we are bringing digital companions to humans that were alone. It's a balance. I think it cannot be everything digital, but maybe the humans we have today don't have time, most of the times, to take care of our own ones. And what they are looking for, of course, companionship. Maybe there is a solution if we do it the right way on digital species that we are creating, that maybe is creating a more human world in society than humans were doing before we have them. So it's an equilibrium. I think that it has to be balanced. The last numbers I saw and heard is that 50%, 5-0 of the content that we have today is AI generated.

Joeri:

Yeah.

Sérgio:

50% is becoming more or less the same as humans are created. It's going to go upper and be unbalanced.

Joeri:

Absolutely. And therefore, you need to have the human element in your content to stand out to do something like more audacious. I'm also talking about that in my book. AI is changing your customer. If you have a question, you want to buy something, people now take their phone and go to Chat GPT or even go to Google, they don't scroll down anymore. It's already answered. This is a big difference. If you have a business, a marketer, an entrepreneur, you want to show up in this AI answers.

Sérgio:

I'm not a specialist on search engine optimization or even artificial intelligence engine optimization, but it's really changing. Until maybe 10 years ago, for each click or a search you were doing on Google, Google was providing for the content provider three, four, five visits for each click. Now maybe you have to have I think that the last number was 6,000 searches to have one view that was redirected to that content. The way we are creating value on the internet for content creators is really broken. It's not yet broken totally because it doesn't change from one day to the other, because there's still a large portion of searches that go on Google. But I think that along the next one year, two years is going to change more dramatically. And so the content producers and the way that they were getting return on investment on the content they were producing is really getting into a different business model that maybe we still have to decide what it's going to be. We have an AI academy where we are teaching how to use this tool correctly in order to augment you and not replace you. What we teach is how to become the next generation of employees where AI and humans work together in order to create better content faster and translating that value into our clients. So that's why we teach. So we have the academy as two parts. One is called AI literacy, where we teach knowledge about what are the tools, how you can use them, what they do, and then we have AI fluency, that is working with the tools, normally in the use cases in ways of working inside UI. And so we train them in both ways. First, know the tools, second, using the tools so that there is AI literacy and AI fluency, and avoiding those kind of things, that is just copying past. Let me just take some of the people that I follow, and I think that they are quite smart and they are in the middle of what they are creating and doing. This change that we are seeing in the world is being controlled by very few people. So it's a handful of people that is really deciding where this is going. And the US has a large number of those people. What they are saying is that we were trained in a society of scarcity. We don't have enough energy, we don't have enough food for everyone, we don't have enough money for everyone. So everything that we do is related with the mindset of scarcity. What they do believe is that this technological revolution is going to create an economy of abundance. The number of companies that will be trillion-dollar companies is going to be so large that the richness of the world is going to maybe be ten times what we have today. And what they believe is they have to divide and share all that richness with the people that in this first phase is going to be effective with AI replacing their jobs. Because capitalism is going to keep being the ruling of the world during this era that we are. And so shareholders, they want more money coming from reducing costs or selling more. So it's the only way of doing it. And replacing people with machines that work 24 by 7, don't get healed, don't do strikes, work every day because they are not mad or sad. This is an impossible equation for them not to replace. And so I think that is going to happen fast. As I was saying before, I expect that our governments take care of us because I do believe that this is a time where I would like to see why we pay so many taxes. We believe in the social state. And I do believe that the social state is good. I have lived in the US, and I know what it is to live in the US and not having access to health or to any basic things that we have in Europe. And so I do believe that Europe is not in a good state because of the sum of the decisions that it's taking. But I do believe that we have a better organization in terms of taking care of our own. I think that one of the things that I'm sure today is that it's very difficult to predict the future. But I know that maybe we are creating a society that if we do it right, is going to be better than today. But we need to do it the right way. Where he has people discussing these kind of things and trying to understand where the world is going. So actually he has very smart people that he invites in order to talk about these difficult questions that we don't have answers today. And just what we are trying to do and he's trying to do is to imagine what is going to be the plausible future regarding what we are seeing today and trying to project what is going to be the world in one year, three years' time, five years' time. But none of us know. I think that it's in between. If we believe that abundance is going to be the future, and if we hope that's the future that we are going to, in between, I think it's the problem. And we've seen that you guys and many of the other people are not hiring as much now. If AI can do in seconds what junior consultants could do, or it could take weeks to deliver, can we then take that logical thought to its end and think that AI is going to really like take out companies like Ernest and Young and and others similar groups? Isn't that the logical conclusion? Yes, it's a logical conclusion. I do believe that we are doing the right things in order to keep our value. So we are keeping hiring people. I've just been in an event. Welcoming 250 new employees coming from universities. So we are not breaking the rule of hiring every September 250, 300 people in Portugal. So I think that we are doing the right thing. Second, we are also transforming ourselves, bringing these tools into our processes and redesigning the processes for delivering more value to our customers. It's not only delivering value, but delivering value from being faster and reducing the cost of doing the same. That's just giving you an example to be precise. For instance, for delivering a strategy to a client, it will take us at least 12 weeks. 12 weeks to 16 weeks. Why? Because it will take us at least eight weeks to 10 weeks to do research, to do compilation of information, to derive findings and insights, and create knowledge to create a strategy. Now we are able to do and reduce these eight weeks of work or ten weeks to two weeks. And what we are doing is that during those two weeks, maybe it's just two or three days of collecting information, summarizing the information, deriving insights and findings with tools. And then comes the human part. We take advantage of being faster, and then we put humans looking into the information and extracting what should be the creativity for the future of that company. That's why we are trying to bring value to clients. The other thing that I do believe is yes, nowadays I think any client has a UI consultant in their pocket. They can talk with them and say, you are an UI consultant, a senior partner with expertise there and there. That is the persona pattern we need to teach these machines so that they know what we want them to impersonate. And they behave like a consultant. What is the problem? The same that we had before, and why companies keep hiring consultants. We do it faster, with less risk. Why? Because companies always knew how to do their transformation, but they don't have the time, they don't have the focus, because day-to-day operations, it's the time to do transformation. And they know that when they hire us and they need us to transform a department, we will go there and we'll have a focus team that during eight weeks, ten weeks, 12 weeks will do the transformation. If they ask the internal people with day-by-day operations, they won't be able to dedicate time to do the transformation. That's not because they don't know how to do it, it's just because they don't have the focus or the time. The other thing is that we have done it so many times, they know that we will reduce the risk of not doing it correctly. I think the value proposition remains the same. What we needed to do is to do it differently, incorporating AI in our daily process. And that's what we are doing. I'm not sure if we are going to be successful, but what I can assure you is that we are doing it to be sure that we are in control of the future we are creating. And that's what we are telling our clients. Don't wait for the future to lead you, lead the future. And this is a consultant way of saying it. It's the right way of saying it. Otherwise, I do believe actually, I'm a UI partner, but I'm also a teacher. What I tell my students is also the same. You can be crying at home or leading your future. So please study, learn, and prepare yourselves so that you have the tools in order to control your future. If you stay at home and you do nothing, the doom is coming.

Audience:

I have a question on sustainability with these problems we say now, we basically for a way of all the water. My question is there from a strategic point, do you see any advances in tech companies trying to solve that sustainability issue we're facing using a lot of energy, we're using a lot of water that we actually need. How is that? Are there any strategies? Is this even a question anymore now? What are we looking at?

Sérgio:

So that's a great question. So actually, just for the audience, every five prompts you do is a bottle of water. This is how much water we are spending in energy. My belief is always on the optimistic side of the value proposition. I think that we are going to be able to solve most of the problems that we as humans created in the world with the help of AI. I think that we are on the edge of solving the fusion energy problem, mostly because we are simulating millions of things to understand how we are going to solve it. Giving you again an example. I told you Alpha Fold. So it was not possible to have cures for cancer until the end of the decade if we were not having the help of these machines. The other one is also quite interesting. It was Google Research again that did it. They developed an enzyme for a specific type of plastic to create a subset of that plastic that we can return. Into the environment without creating any pollution. And what that with that discovery, what they are going now to do is create all the enzymes that are going to be able to do to all the plastics that we create in the world for the last maybe 50 years. So this is the things that we I think why we need now to invest in maybe being not very sustainable, because with what we are going to this to accelerate in terms of discoveries, it's going to help us to solve the problem that we have. And what we are saying is that are we going to stop technologic development just it's going to be, from my perspective, a stupid decision. We have the solutions we need in order to create a better world and also a possibility of being here for many, many thousand years. And today we know if you don't solve this, maybe you are going to be here for more 200 years or even less. So that's what I believe. You ask me, are you sure, Sergio? No, I'm not. But I think it's the best solution. So I look into options, and that's what I do in my normal life and also with clients. I look into options, I select the best one. I think that's the best one. Is keeping pushing because if we find the solution for this, this is going to be a better world.

Jo:

Okay. Let's continue the conversation with a dream. And something to eat. First of all, I would like to thank Edu and Juli for the great information that you share with us. What I would like you to remember is that this is a revolution, not in one industry, it's in all industries. So this is not stopping. And yeah, the choice is yours. So educate yourself, educate the new generation. I think it's super important. And let's keep spreading the word to other people as well. Thank you very much for being here. See you on the next events. Thank you very much.

Joeri:

This was the conversation I had with Sergio Ferreira, partner at EY Portugal, at EY Lisbon during our AI and Marketing for Entrepreneurs event. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to share this episode with people around you that can benefit, that want to know more about the world of AI and all the possibilities. Of course, if you haven't subscribed yet, this is a really good moment to do this. If you haven't given me a review yet, if you give me this 5 stars, this will help me reach an even bigger audience. Also, you can grab a copy of my book The Future CMO on Amazon and get the audiobook for free. And also, you will have access to my future CMO community. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, don't wait for the future to lead you, lead the future.

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