Antonio Lucio starts by separating two things that get used interchangeably. Marketing functions have used AI for a long time: media buying has been machine to machine since programmatic was invented over a decade ago, and recommendation and performance work has run on it for years.
What changed with generative AI is conversation and interaction with the machine, and so far most of its use is about productivity rather than creation.
Key findings
- Research he cites puts 70 percent of generative AI use in the workforce into two buckets: more effective searching, and summarizing or synthesizing.
- Only about 30 percent of use goes to creation, which he considers the real opportunity: tapping broader sources of information to create new experiences faster and more affordably.
- His own marketing organization mirrors that pattern, with most use in synthesis and analysis, such as the research and communications teams condensing analyst reports on quarterly earnings.
- The sales effect he describes is a shift in how time is spent. Summarizing emails, call reports and proposals frees people to do more consultative selling and to understand customer needs better.
- The company’s own annual global study, covering twelve countries with a sample of around 15,000, finds only about 28 percent of people report a positive relationship with work.
Work is not that great to begin with
Three things drive the low score. People do not feel professional fulfillment, they do not think leadership puts people first, and they do not feel they are advancing in knowledge and skills.
Most knowledge workers, in his account, spend less than half their time on tasks they consider productive and fulfilling, with the rest going to administrative and managerial work that gets in the way.
That is why he rejects the framing of the debate. Rather than assuming work is great and technology will make people obsolete, he argues we have to acknowledge that work is not that great today, and the data proves it.
He illustrates it with a doctor who described his career as 80 percent administrative and 20 percent care, and said that flipping it to an even split would make his work more fulfilling and give each patient half an hour instead of ten minutes.
He also notes that tools change the result. With the right equipment, software, management focus and support, the work relationship measure improves by more than 11 points.
He is not naive about misuse, having lived through the social media transformation, but argues that fear should not stop experimentation, because playing with the technology is what allows the right checks and balances to be built.
Why the pilots had to stop
When he arrived, the marketing organization was running 61 separate generative AI pilots with different startups. It made a good story, but none of them really saw the light of day.
The reason he gives is alignment. They were not connected to the overall transformation of the company, and were essentially marketing experiments run with marketing agents.
The technology chief’s own view confirmed it: most of the pilots were with small experimental partners who could not scale and might not be safe inside the company’s firewalls.
The resolution was to change ownership of the work. The two organizations agreed it would be a company transformation project that marketing was part of, rather than a marketing transformation.
The underlying principle is that tool selection is not marketing’s competency. Marketing’s job is to build brand and drive the business, and it should rely on experts in an emerging space rather than duplicating their research.
At scale, the company deliberately avoids being a first mover with fringe startups, going instead with established partners because a solution has to work from day one and work globally.
The ambition attached is that marketing becomes the internal use case, so the company can show customers how it does this in communications, marketing and sales.
The CMO’s four jobs
He defines the role tightly. Craft a vision in line with the business strategy, align that vision across the leadership team, secure the right capabilities in people, systems and budgets, and remove roadblocks.
Execution is not on the list. That is what the team is for, and transformation in a large company runs on the CMO’s partnerships with the rest of the executive team, which for him means the CFO, the chief transformation officer and the business unit leaders.
The change he wants is systemic rather than local: not solving one problem with one new tool, but building the brand and the business across the world by using the best available tools holistically.
What marketing brings, and why he is hopeful
He says marketing has the potential to lead this but is not necessarily driving it yet. The contributions he names are customization for the client, faster insights to optimize creative within the decision journey, and the ability to measure the results.
His third point is about time. More time means more thinking about how to build the brand within culture, community and society, and he expects creativity to have a renaissance as a result.
On fear, his research points to exposure. People already using generative AI have a significantly more positive view of what it can do for them, and the fearful minority are those who have not tried it.
His historical argument is that disruption is always visible before creation is. When digital arrived, everyone saw jobs disappearing in creative and media departments and nobody foresaw the companies that would be built.
He does not dismiss the cost. He expects older workers to be displaced and finds that genuinely hard, while expecting people under fifty to retrain as they always have.
His summary of his own position is short. Optimism is a choice.
What he thinks leaders need to carry forward
He names three things: being anchored in values more than ever, critical thinking as the most important asset for any leader, and awareness that confirmation bias is real as these systems are built.
He applies the criticism to his own profession, arguing that marketing became detached from the people it serves and overlooked basic human needs.
His conclusion returns to the discipline’s original purpose. Marketing was created to be empathetic with customers without judgment, and he says that was forgotten.
He is equally direct about purpose work, arguing that growth through purpose and sustainability are means to an end rather than ends in themselves.
Scope and limitations
The source is an automatically produced transcript with garbled passages, and the statistics quoted come from the speaker’s own company research rather than from independent sources.
Source
This page summarises Transcript: Antonio Lucio (HP) Interview on Humanized Growth in the Era of AI, by Mariana Peneva, Antonio Lucio, December 3, 2024.