Does AI-mageddon Beckon?

In his second Campaign column of the year, our Founding Partner and Chairman Charles Vallance breaks down why AI won't replace humans, but humans who use AI will.

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We are lucky enough to work in an industry which everyone approaches with an open mouth. We make the most public product in the world, and everyone has the right to an opinion on it. Never more so than at a time of crisis - and AI is certainly proving to be one of those crisis moments.

A technology which is barely 3 years old is seeing Holding Company share prices plunge (so much so that I heard them described as Holding On Companies at an advertising event recently). Meanwhile, the industry chatterati are in full voice, with the consensus view being anything but cheery.

Whilst not everyone is predicting doom and gloom, there are very few AI evangelists to counterbalance the many naysayers who see the new technology as an existential threat to our business. Thus the title for this month’s column.
Given the heat around the subject, there is no shortage of speculation and conjecture about AI‘s future impact. So, rather than add to the predictive verbiage, I thought it might be useful to concentrate less on what will be and more on what has happened to date. This may help to provide more practical clues as to what’s coming down the line.

I say this in part because VCCP were early adopters of generative AI, launching faith, our specialist AI division, in March 2023. Through a test and learn approach (formerly known as trial and error), we have built up a considerable body of knowledge about what AI does and doesn’t look like in the real world.

The first thing we’ve learnt is that the pioneer of AI, Sam Altman, was right when he said that AI is “very good at doing tasks, but terrible at doing whole jobs”.

This is reassuring for all disciplines and skills that are upstream of specific, function-based roles. But there are clear repercussions for those further downstream where the threat of obsolescence is greatest.|

In these cases, however, it’s worth noting that the workload is often by nature repetitive and routine. This means there can frequently be an upside to automation, in that the labour displaced by task-based AI can be upskilled to do more varied and productive work.

Whilst this can’t be guaranteed, it is a considerable silver lining. Indeed, a recent research study by Vanguard found that the top 100 occupations ‘most exposed to AI automation’ are actually outperforming the rest of the labour market in terms of jobs growth and real wage increases.

This would certainly echo our experience at VCCP. There have been numerous efficiencies as a result of AI, which have resulted in considerable workload reductions in routine tasks. But these reductions have been far outweighed by the extent of the new opportunities opened up and made possible by AI.

Whole new fields of capability, from GEO optimisation to Synthetic Research and Automated Asset Generation have proved accretive to the business. Moreover, they have enabled us to in-house what would previously have been outsourced.

The success stories nearly all follow the Altman principle of being narrowly task-focused. The best tools we have developed at VCCP are designed for very specific requirements - e.g. how to optimise a brand’s discoverability, how to build an agentic customer service capability or create a synthetic research persona.

What this means in practice is that there is at least the same amount of work, if not more, but it is of higher value. The tools that enable the legwork to be done
automatically free up more time for higher order thinking and execution.

It is this syndrome that prompted Harvard Business Review to conclude that AI is currently not reducing workload so much as ‘intensifying’ it. It certainly feels that way at the moment, and long may it continue.

Given the topic, I felt obliged to ask an AI engine (Gemini) to answer the autobiographical question, ‘how much of a threat does AI pose to the advertising industry?’ Reassuringly, and disconcertingly in equal measure, it came to pretty much the same conclusion as your analogue columnist; “AI is less a 'killer' of advertising and more of a filter. It is filtering out the repetitive, the mediocre and the inefficient. For the 'big idea' thinkers, the threat is minimal; for the 'execution-only' shops, the threat is existential”.

Whatever you choose to believe about the future of AI, one conclusion is inescapable. To quote Sam Altman again, “AI won’t replace humans. But humans who use AI will replace those who don’t”.