The crowd wore grey. She wore yellow. Also, a chunky bracelet and strappy heels.
+++
Andrea Palmer sat center stage at the event she had created just four years earlier, HealthFront. Once more for emphasis, *the* event. With great one-liners like, “You ran it for them, you can run it for me.” Or, “I see you there, kid,” for a client with an in-market product for pediatric eye care, the ‘Front had moved from the outskirts to mainstream.
Andrea knew the sparsely filled room of people who market arrhythmia products and who can’t see why it’s funny that they ask agencies to create heart-pounding ads to run on CNN were waiting for her to drop bombs.
Flanked by the person who won Ru Paul’s Drag Race to her left and a woman who’d been married to not one but two pro basketball players and had the double-hyphenated name to prove it on the other side, the woman who runs the health division of a global agency couldn’t say what people always say. She looked down at the index card clutched so tightly in her right hand, that it was bending. Informed, she delivered the event’s opening line…
“AI is going to be a great tool for evaluating data with less human error.”
Um…
Right now, if you ask AI, “What is 1+1+1+3+1+1+1-3+2+1+2+3?” AI will tell you confidently, it’s, “18.” It’s not. No human analyst at any agency who evaluates data would get that wrong. Even if they did, they would show their work and get some part marks.
When the people who lead industry-entrancing thought circles from center stage at events and the pseudo-celebrities compelled to produce gobs of copy to retain their Top Voice merit sticker on LinkedIn need something to say, they say things about AI.
Gartner, the consulting company with twenty-thousand employees, two million followers on LinkedIn, and a market cap that’s more than doubled in the past year knows a thing or forty-two about presenting sweet nothings when it comes to AI.
Last fall, Mark Raskino took a stage as impressive as his Gartner Fellow title to tell a room (I have no idea if it was full, the pictures never show the audience) that he had, “Not seen the uptake a technology personally in the job a CEO like that, since the invention of the iPad.” Sic and sick. Still, I think we know what he meant. If we didn’t, this next line told the story, “44% of CEOs used ChatGPT in their job in 1H23.” Wowzers. That’s nearly half. And, that was a year ago. Certainly, by now, that percentage is much higher. So, there’s a better even money chance Andrea has used ChatGPT.
I looked past the 2000-point font 44% was in to see the funny part. To the tiny footnote on the next slide. Gartner, the company who consults to just about every company, surveyed 48 CEOs. Forty-eight.
We can make grand statements about AI because AI is an asymmetric topic. You get all sorts of props when you say anything. And, there’s no downside because: one, there’s no data; and bee, no one will follow up. Andrea’s, “Going to be,” is a sufficiently vague term that no one will check back with her to ask how great a tool it’s become. Ever.
For all the time you give me, it’s time I gave you something back. Stats. AI stats you can share on LinkedIn or drop into the slides you make for your boss or team that AI doesn’t make for you.
For y’all, I asked several senior executives I know, “Do you use ChatGPT?” And other questions about their AI use. My results lined up with Gartner’s about as well as AI’s answer to simple arithmetic lined up with correctness.
* 15% used ChatGPT once in the past month.
* 8% paid for a paid ChatGPT account.
* <1% could define, “GPT.”
* 92% said AI could transform their business.
* 83% of the 92% couldn’t say how AI would transform their business; or when.
* 77% said their only chat was to ask ChatGPT what it said about them.
In other news, Google’s CFO, Ruth Porat just said this, “The tech sector is in the midst of a tremendous platform shift with Al.” That’s why, she claims, Alphabet is laying off finance people in India.
Because these days, if it’s about AI, you can say anything.