“The more people bring AI in-house the better it will be for the environment”…

“You’ve got to spend the money to take advantage of the opportunity – and you can say but AI is free, but it isn't - that's just bad AI”…

“AI allows us to do the art of marketing without marketing” …

A slightly longer episode this week, but boy is it an interesting one! In this episode of Can Marketing Save the Planet we bring together two of the biggest conversations in the world today; AI and sustainability to find out if they are friend or foe. Joined by tech futurist Dan Södergren and sustainability guy, Russ Avery, we discuss questions around, is business and society responsible enough to use AI? Why AI policies a must for organisations - and, how can Marketers use AI in an informed and meaningful way?

As with any big subject matter we jump straight into the challenges and opportunities. When it comes to challenges we of course go straight to the environmental impact where Russ explains, “AI -driven data centers are projected to consume 90 terawatt hours annually by 2026, which will be a 10 -fold increase from 2022 levels, which is only three years ago. And for context, that's equivalent to the energy uses of some entire countries.” Only part of the story - but something we should all be aware of as we all look to AI and how it will increasingly become more prevalent in our lives.

Dan agrees that energy is definitely something we need to be aware of, but more importantly, “it's more the fact of what you do with it. En-masse if you just take it out by itself and you add it on to the marketing you're doing, then yes, by its very nature, you're going to be creating more problems because you are going to be using more energy. But on the whole, he believes AI can make the world a better place (caveat - if the good guys use it). The ‘fifth industrial revolution’ also comes up a lot in this conversation, but you’ll need to tune in to find out more.

We talk about the need for more education, upskilling and awareness. Training is another area that we keep coming back to. Russ talks about the need for education and using AI responsibly, “we should not be using AI for socially useless mundane purposes’ – Take note Marketers! Dan agrees that education and understanding is critical if we want to be more productive and less wasteful. Both share hints, tips and ways we (Marketers) can all be using AI more effectively.

Russ believes that Marketers can use AI effectively if they “lean into their curiosity and understand the foundations of what you are using”, he goes on to explain, “I would just encourage Marketers to learn about the fundamentals of AI because it can only benefit your understanding how these things work and how they actually came about”.

Dan talks about the need for better prompt engineering, an understanding of language models and, the need for culture change, moving away from specialisation and IP to considering, “how does your organisation incentivise not just the use of AI, but actually incentivise the best practice use of AI? Say I've created a great prompt, what's in it for me to share that knowledge with the rest of the team? Now, that's something we've never really had.”

There is simply too much in this episode to summarise here in a way that does it justice, you’ll just need to tune in and get your pens and pads ready….and then click on the links in the show notes to take advantage of the offers from Dan…we certainly will be.

Tune in and listen as we talk to Dan and Russ about:

• The challenges and opportunities around AI
• The ethics...