Tell us about yourself. What are you working on right now?

I lead the product and brand marketing team at Amplience. We are known as a leader in the content management space for commerce experiences but in the last few months, we've been building out our vision and strategy around becoming an AI content platform, and building capabilities for marketers and merchants who are focused on that commerce side of things. That's brands—retailers, travel, grocery, quick service restaurants—who need to produce high volumes of high quality content to sell their products faster than they ever could before. My work has been focused on helping to build that strategy with my colleagues in product and elsewhere. [I’m] also working with my team to be able to bring that to life in the market so that our prospects and customers and partners and influencers and analysts are all aware and excited about what we're doing.

When was your first encounter with AI?

My first encounter with AI as we know it today was when I was in product marketing at a company called Criteo. They're in the advertising technology space and they were one of the first adopters of machine learning capabilities in order to essentially identify when you were more likely to click on an ad and buy something. This tool is a technology that was based on interest and intent. That was really my first chance to get to know machine learning technology in depth. Like many others, my first exposure to generative AI really was last year when it really exploded. Even though generative AI has been around for a long time, last year it became just so readily accessible that you didn't have to be a data scientist to start leveraging this technology. Last year was when we as a company strategically decided that there was an opportunity for us to be able to move into that space, given our background in content.

How do you continue to use AI at work?

Our target audience is marketers and merchants who are responsible for selling products through the experiences that they manage, and through scheduled campaigns. 

The reality today is that as consumers, we are influenced in our buying decisions by the context that is around us, where we are, our home we live in, what is going on in the news. What did somebody wear on social media that completely blew up trends that are happening? These influence us more than ever before. And the thing is, they're unpredictable and they're unscheduled and they happen right now. [For example, think about] the Barbie movie last year. Many brands and retailers didn't catch that in time. There are some who did. And you had the “Barbie x” campaigns, right? Or the “Pink x” campaigns, but those were all planned ahead of time. The ones who didn't, missed out. One of our customers is a sports goods retailer, and they’ve said that they missed out on pink roller skates. They could have been [moving] those like crazy if they took advantage of them. That's the challenge that brands have: they can't react in time and they can't produce enough content to be able to support the products today. 

In many cases, if I see an ad for a product that I'm interested in and I click on it, whether it's on social media or on a website or wherever it may be, I typically get to a product page, right? And sometimes there’s just not enough information to convince me to click buy right there. I may say, “Oh, maybe I got to do some more research on this one,” Simply because those marketers and merchandisers and other product managers can't create enough content to support all the different contexts that we use to decide. 

The thing about artificial intelligence is that it's really dumb.

At Amplience, we're essentially saying, if you can't do that as a human, to react in time and to do enough of it, then let's look at Gen AI to be able to do that for you. Everything from generating all different kinds of product content—whether that is a buyer's guide, new product descriptions, comparisons, listings, ads, what have you—to manipulating images, taking existing approved resources and manipulating them for campaigns. The challenge is that you can't just use Gen AI as it's available openly today because the results are really poor. It will make up products, things like that. It needs to be tuned and tested against content and assets that are made for selling products, while maintaining brand voice and values, and that requires a lot of prompt engineering behind the scenes. That is what we are working on.

Do you have any tips you could share?

I'm going to focus on the marketer because I'm a marketer. My first tip is to really embrace it. Sometimes [AI] may seem a little scary, reading the headlines and what have you, but the reality is, just like with any other technology wave that came before it, those who will embrace it are the ones who will step forward and replace those who don't. It's not the technology that's going to replace us and what we do, it is those who embrace it. I've seen it before with the cloud. “Oh yeah, that's going to replace IT professionals because now they won't have to manage their own servers. They can actually just use this thing called the cloud and it's being managed by somebody else.” Guess what? That didn't happen and IT is still around. Before that, desktop publishing comes to mind and mobile applications. These are all just technologies, where those who embrace them are the ones who will lead.

What was your journey from chemical engineering to product marketing?

I was looking for work as a chemical engineer once I graduated, both in the UK and in the US, because I did want to move over to the US. And while I was going through that process, I needed some work. So I reached out to the local temp agency where I was living in the suburbs of London, and they said, “Oh, Adobe is looking for someone to join their marketing team for a couple of weeks to help them out with a project in their London office,” which wasn't too far away from where I lived. I was supposed to be there for two weeks. 17 years later, I was still there. I really did come in on the ground floor. Thankfully, Adobe had an opportunity for me to move to the US and work over here, and I just worked my way through. I was a solutions engineer for many years in technical pre-sales. Then I moved into product marketing.

What would you suggest to someone who wants to get into AI?

If you really want to get into AI, one other field I also recommend getting into is neuroscience, because there's still so much unknown about the human mind and human intelligence as well. There's still tons of research going on, and what's been learned just in the last few years has leapfrogged what has been known for the last few decades, and there's still more to learn. It is absolutely fascinating to get an insight into how the human mind and human intelligence work and then compare that to how artificial intelligence works. You realize that, yes, artificial intelligence is amazing technology, but compared to what the human mind is capable of, we still have a long way to go.

Do you have a hot take on generative AI?

This is something I learned from someone who was academically leading in AI, especially in deep learning, and also later in Gen AI. He used to say that the thing about artificial intelligence is that it's really dumb. It's going to be a very long time before we have what's called AGI—artificial general intelligence. It probably will never happen. AI is good at one thing. Where it gets interesting is when AI starts communicating with AI as agents, to be able to string together multiple tasks. But, yeah, my hot take that makes people go, “Huh?” is, I'll say, “The thing about AI, it’s really dumb.”