Facing AI Disruption: Are You Prepared for the New Workforce? | Under the Brand

Will AI take over jobs? 

The truth is, we’re not actually prepared to adapt to its speed, but the key to keeping up is how we scale our workforce.

→ You need futurists who can spot trends + anticipate where opportunities exist + act on those.

→ Not everyone adapts at the same pace. Having a culture of compassion gives your team space to grow.

Hear how we’re building an AI-ready workforce at my agency. Listen now.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to Under the Brand. I'm your host, Valerie Jennings. Today I want to talk about a catalyst per destruction. And I'm talking specifically about your workforce. We are not ready or prepared to adopt at the speed of AI, nor is our workforce ready for that. So, what is the answer? Some of you might even feel like you're working more hours, or AI is actually adding to your work. I think it's fair. I think AI, while it is an efficiency tool, is still triping a lot of chaos in our organizations. People don't know which tools to use, how to best use it, what is approved within an organization, and how to scale with AI. I want to spend a little bit of time talking about how we're tackling these challenges at my agency, Jenning Social Media Martech. I have always been an early adopter of digital marketing all the way back to 2005 when I adopted social media strategies. Through 22 years in business, I have continued to test and adopt with tech and marketing. But now I do feel like even with the AI tools, it is going faster than it's ever gone. This disruption is across all industries, and even regular day-to-day processes and systems are not working or scaling the way they used to. So I think there is definitely a wave of new jobs and job descriptions that are coming, especially in the marketing space. I'll give you an example. We recently hired an AI operations manager. Nobody is an a hundred percent expert on AI and designing AI systems for us because we adopt so quickly. I am the one that's looking at where are the trends, where are the opportunities, where is the value, where's the competitive edge, where are clients gonna get value? And also how do these tools add efficiency to the bottom line, whether that's with data and analytics, whether it's with creative services, there's definitely been a big lift in the product, the quality of the product, and what we're able to do and the price points that we can charge at because of AI. But we are all in a learning stage. And even at the C-suite, whether you're a brand, whether you are just a business that's not focused on marketing right now, you need people that are a futurist. They are studying the trends, they can kind of anticipate where the opportunities are gonna go. They are the ones that are able to cultivate people to test uh these uh products and services and see if they're gonna provide the value that your organization needs to compete in an era in AI. The second job that I think is really essential is a project manager meshed with operations who can take these ideas, these learnings, and implement a process model within the organization, write the new playbooks around the AI systems and tools so that your organization is using it across the board. Not some people are using it, not others are using it. And the third thing that I think is really critical right now is that there is an open culture of compassion. We are all absorbing a lot of data, information, and key learnings all at once. And some of us are just faster adopters than others, but we have to make sure that we create a platform where the workforce can come together within your organizations into trainings and share knowledge and start providing more feedback of, okay, I'm using this tool. It's working for me. This is how I'm getting value of it and make sure that there is continuity across your team or across those various departments. There are roadblocks, of course, to doing all of this because a lot of the systems and processes we have to throw out the window. They're not scaling, they're not working, there's not continuity, or there's too many restrictions, and people that work at certain organizations feel like they can't grow or evolve. There's also been a lot of across agencies, a lot of consolidation, decentralized approaches, especially within creative services, because of AI. To me, I think that instead of pushing people out, we do have to find a way to get their skills to translate into the bigger ecosystem of AI. So while there's many aspects of this conversation, those were the three areas that I wanted to highlight that we're currently focused on in our agency. It's a very exciting time, but it's also uh a time, uh, an era of chaos and disruption. And so how you set that tone in your organization is very critical right now and is going to lay the roadmap to your future success as a business. Again, you've been watching Under the Brand. I'm your host, Valerie Jennings.