Cleve Gibbon

Knowledge workers use their intellectual skills to create, process, and share information. Scientists, architects, engineers, lawyers, teachers, analysts, planners, and software developers are just a few examples of knowledge workers that think for a living.  They are key contributors to innovation and problem-solving in various industries, leveraging their expertise to drive decisions and strategies.

However, the role and responsibilities of knowledge workers is evolving fast with the accelerated adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent automation (IA) – AiA – into future digital workforce.

We’ve heard that 50% of knowledge workers have used AiA in some form or other, directly or indirectly. Moreover, that number increases to over 90% within marketing and advertising.  Interestingly, this usage is not driven by corporate policy.  It’s more self-taught and home schooled.  Nevertheless, AiA usage is on the rise.

Knowledge Workers in Marketing and Advertising

In marketing, knowledge workers craft messages that resonate with audiences for advertising outcomes. These creatives, from copywriters and designers to strategists and analysts, harness their expertise to develop campaigns that captivate and persuade. As the intelligence age advances, AiA is transforming knowledge worker roles and responsibilities, amplifying creativity and efficiency.

Let’s be clear here, AiA’s influence is profound across the end-2-end creative process.  We are automating routine tasks. Prioritizing the best use cases for specific AI tools from analyzing consumer data and predicting trends to generating intelligent outputs to inform targeted marketing strategies. This enables marketers to craft personalized campaigns that speak directly to individual preferences, significantly enhancing engagement and conversion rates.

Now an advertising agency might employ AI to generate multiple versions of an advertisement, each tailored to different audience segments based on online behavior and preferences. But that’s a lot of additional content.  However, the ambition is to streamline the creative process so that each ad variation is optimized for maximum impact.  It also shifts the certain responsibilities of knowledge workers from creator to curator in the creative process.  And all this what-if ad impact analysis is done at design time, before the ad is activated, if at all.  Yet again adding review and approve responsibilities to the knowledge worker. 

And AiA adoption is not a given

Adoption is critical for sustainable change.  HR departments are in the people trenches fielding the inevitable structural changes to digital workforce of the future. Here are a couple of major and minor organizational AI trends:

Major Trend	Minor Trend
Investment increasing	Confidence in right AiA investment bets
Likelihood of people replacement	Employee support for change
Workforce transformation	Expertise for transformation

Basically, you hear a lot noise about the major trends and less about the minor trends. However, we need to pay more attention to the minors to bring favorable outcomes for the majors, increasing AiA adoption across the organization.