What you need to know:

• Ex-ADMA CEO and IBM CMO, Jodie Sangster, former CMOs of World Vision and Deloitte, Louise Cummins and Rochelle Tognetti, and former strategy guru of The Works by Capgemini, Douglas Nicol, have come together to launch the Australian Centre for AI in Marketing, aimed at assisting marketers to get up to speed on how to use AI and building capability.
• The ‘pro-purpose’ organisation is the giving back part; the four have also launched a commercial AI ready consulting business to provide AI strategy and services.
• Sangster and Cummins see job loss fears, a lack of time, AI hype and not knowing where to start on AI as all contributing to the readiness gap existing around marketing when it comes to AI capability.
• ACAM will use informal meetings, benchmarking studies, insights sessions plus an AI Pioneer panel of CMOs at varying levels of AI maturity and adoption to share a warts-and-all view on how marketing makes AI work for them, not the other way around.
• 'Pioneers' signed up so far include: Ikea head of marketing Kirsten Hasler, Menulog CMO Simon Cheng, The Iconic CMO Joanna Robinson, former Nine CMO Liana Dubois, Anytime Fitness CMO, Caitlin Bancroft and Fraser McNaughton, CMO at Grant Thornton.

For some marketing leaders, fear of missing out on tech’s latest AI-driven transformative wave and by extension, a strategic seat at the exec table, is palpable. With others, short-term time constraints have kept them from leaping in to find longer-term productivity gains. Then there are those who worry they’ll have to sacrifice their favourite creative jobs to an AI agent if they go there – or worse, will simply be replaced if the boss gets wind of the efficiency step change they’ve found by tapping an AI tool.

Enter ex-ADMA CEO and IBM CMO, Jodie Sangster, the former CMOs of World Vision and Deloitte, Louise Cummins and Rochelle Tognetti, and former strategy guru of The Works, Douglas Nicol. The four have made it a mission to help every marketer, not just the cashed-up ones or those inside the largest enterprises, get a handle on how AI can help them do their jobs better.

The result is the Australian Centre for AI in Marketing (ACAM), which launches this week as a self-described ‘pro-purpose’ organisation focused on providing warts-and-all experiences and advice so marketers don’t get left behind on AI. The founders are simultaneously taking the wrappers off a new consulting venture dubbed Air – AKA AI ready – by which they aim to fund the broader organisation.

ACAM, per its website, will be initially founder-funded. It states: "Our long-term goal is to establish a sustainable funding model, reinvesting profits from our consulting services and programs to further support our mission and expand our reach within the marketing community."

Sangster told Mi3 ACAM is the founders' way of giving back to the industry to plug the readiness gap that’s obvious around marketing’s know-how of AI.

“Companies are not ready for adoption of AI for various different reasons,” says Sangster. “So as much as we go together and said we do want to work with companies around getting them ready for AI, our realisation was that actually, the individual also needs help here. Because there are a lot of blockers and reasons why individuals aren’t ready to adopt AI. That may be because of skills. It may also be the fear factor. Often, it’s time: They’re doing big jobs and they don’t feel they have the time to do it.”

Some might also think AI is all hype, Sangster continues. “So we had this penny drop moment where we’re like, you know what, if companies are really going to be able to leverage this opportunity around AI, we’ve got to get Australian marketers ready as well.”

That’s also why ACAM is not membership-based, Cummins and Sangster say. “There’s actually a bit of a duty on us to use some of the money from consulting and push that back in to bring everyone on this journey, not just the ones who can afford it.”

CMOs can’t afford to miss the bus

Fear of being left behind and missing the AI wave is very real with some marketers. Arguably, it should be more acute with others.

In a recent Chatham House rules roundtable on how marketing leaders harness AI to propel marketing forward, the CMO of one of Australia’s larger retailers said its CEO is leading the impetus for AI advancement as an essential tool for the future, with “pace more important than perfection”. The marketing function is going all-in, proactively connecting with other cross-functional teams, opening lines of communications and offering up team members to become accelerators and influencers. It’s all a bid to ensure marketing is not left behind on this latest transformative tech wave.

“As marketing, we have missed a few revolutions over time – internally, we’re making sure with AI we don’t miss it this time and have a seat at the table,” the CMO said.

Notably, recent numbers out of a Canva marketing study found eight in 10 marketers are planning to ramp up AI investment this year against a predicted spend of US$8.3 billion in Australia on AI by 2027, according to IDC. ACAM also points to a Harvard Business School report showing AI will unlock a 25 per cent boost in productivity and 40 per cent leap in quality.

Yet six in 10 right now struggle to integrate in AI tools in workflow. It’s this capability gap that worries Infosys global CMO, Sumit Virmani. He told Mi3 in a recent interview that empowerment of marketing teams to harness AI is absolutely critical if they’re to find not just the efficiency aspects of AI that should be front and centre right now, but also the higher-order use cases it can drive, such as scaled personalisation and experience improvements for customers.

“I feel there’s almost a weaponisation that comes with AI,” comments Cummins, who calls herself “AI curious” but has concerns about the yawning gap between those that don’t know anything about AI, and those that do.

“The question for us became: How do we as leaders in the industry help guide people through this era? Because I think it’s going to be the biggest shift I’ll see during my career,” says Cummins.

“My journey was I had done the RMIT AI course Jodie ran, and I’ve always been involved in digital transformation in my former roles at World Vision Australia and H&R Block. We were looking at AI back in my days at Optus. But I had this penny drop moment where I saw we’re about to see such a seismic shift in the industry. So we started doing pilots, we set up governance structures. But what I also realised was there was this real fear within people, and this chasm between people who were really excited about AI, and ones that were really fearful. I was concerned organisations are going to leave all these fearful people behind.”

Control versus contribution

Like plenty of technology disruptions before it, one potential challenge of AI adoption for marketers is going to be they don’t control all of it. In many instances, org-wide AI governance and risk frameworks are going to come from the top down, while access to the tech platforms and tools will inevitably sit with IT. In those instances, marketing has a responsibility to understand how AI can be used in marketing’s context, and feed that up to ensure it is part of that wider AI strategy, says Sangster.

“If you're looking at one of the areas where AI is going to have a huge impact, it is marketing. Is that always seen in the overarching strategy? Not always. Which is why CMOs need to be on top of this, understanding it, seeing where you can drive better results, better efficiencies, whatever it may be, and pushing that information up,” she says.

Equally, Sangster sees a bottom-up approach that’s necessary for AI adoption in organisations where these whole-of-company AI plays are not in existence.

“This is where marketing teams have that great opportunity to just test something really small and discrete and see what results they can get,” she says. “Then they can potentially scale out to other areas where AI can help marketing. And sometimes that’s the catalyst for the rest of the business to go, whoa, hold on, if they can do that, then are there other applications for AI?

“So while there are these overarching strategies to some extent, I think it’s there for marketers to take up the mantle and go right, we are going to change how marketing is done.”

Cummins agrees it’s vital marketers be in the driver’s seat of how AI will impact marketing and customer experience – and that means stepping in, not stepping out, of the AI conversation, she adds.

Collaborative learning

Alongside their own expertise, ACAM has created an AI Pioneers Circle, a collective of senior Australian marketers who will provide insight, direction and their own real-world experiences to guide AI adoption in marketing.

The group includes CMOs and executives from Woolworths, Ikea, Nine Entertainment, The Iconic, Menulog, Bluescope, Mirvac and Australia Red Cross Life Blood. The pioneers will also advise ACAM on where barriers lies in tackling AI adoption in marketing, from people and culture through to risk, legacy technology and learning and capability building. Most importantly, the point is all of these contributors are at different stages of the journey, say Sangster and Cummins.

“The whole idea of ACAM and our AI Pioneers Circle is how we get the leaders within our industry help the whole industry move into this new era,” says Cummins. “How do we make sure AI helps these incredibly skilled marketers? How do we bring them along the journey? Because AI isn’t about replacing humans. This is about getting rid of all the admin, the stuff that isn’t the reason why we go into marketing. It’s about freeing people up to regain the soul of good marketing.”

For his part, Australia Red Cross Life Blood CMO, Jeremy Weiss, said being part of the AI Pioneers Circle is a way of building practical AI knowledge through peer-to-peer learning.

“This is especially vital in the not-for-profit sector, where AI can maximise team expertise, improve efficiency and ensure every dollar is spent effectively,” he comments. “For Lifeblood, AI presents a unique opportunity to reimagine both the customer experience and how we work, driving greater impact for the community we serve.”

Not another industry association

The first cab off the rank for ACAM is an AI-readiness benchmarking study, to be released in April. Also in the plan are insights labs, talks with power users and tech insiders, free upskilling sessions and even scholarships to progress learning.

“What’s the difference between us and an ADMA, or a publication, or something else? A couple of key things,” says Sangster. “First of all, the majority of what we do is going to be available to everybody – the whole idea is we want everyone to have access to this. This is not about somebody who can afford a training course… The second thing about what makes us different is collaboration. It’s about bringing people together. We have people in the industry doing incredible things, and we have people who haven’t started the journey.

“We want to bring these people together and go, right, let’s share this. Let’s share the learnings from someone who is trailblazing, but let’s also learn from someone who can’t start because the business is saying stop, we’re not doing this for compliance reasons.

“Do we want to be a publication? No. Do we want to be an industry association? No. We want to ensure we can bring everyone together to learn from each other in whatever way that suits them. If it’s face-to-face, great; if it’s online, great. We’ll adapt as time goes on.”