Thought Leadership and Artificial Intelligence | Spencer Ante | 473

How does the world of thought leadership intersect with the growing technology of AI? A lot of news stories lately have focused on the use of AI "bots" to answer questions, generate images, or create entire dissertations on a topic. As the technology grows closer and closer to replicating actual human thinking, we have to ask, "How will AI be used in thought leadership?" To help better understand the field we are joined by Spencer Ante. Spencer has a background in business journalism, investigative reporting and was most recently the Head of Insights at Meta. We begin the discussion by looking back at the origins of thought leadership which has been around far longer than most people assume. Spencer lays out the three phases of thought leadership he has seen from company blogs in the early days of the internet, to more sophisticated uses blending owned content with earned, paid, and social media. The through threads of all of these are honesty and trust. Spencer explains why these aspects are the foundation of good thought leadership and how you risk your reputation when your thought leadership leans into the realms of product marketing or sales enablement. As for the future of AI, Spencer share how machine learning works – that it requires humans to feed it datasets and that humans will play a key role in that learning for decades to come, working to ensure that the information it is fed is factual and verified. As AI continues to learn it will still lack concepts such as empathy, creativity and the ability to generate original ideas, the ability to connect ideas that are not obviously related remains a human quality. This means AI will serve as a great tool for thought leaders to streamline content creation, having a great new source for communication, research and marketing. This is a great conversation on a topic that is going to be relevant for many years to come. Three Key Takeaways: * The need and dependence on thought leadership will continue to grow, as trust in media and governments dwindles with an expanding world. * When creating thought leadership, lead with the problem your product solves, and not the product itself. That's how you generate an audience. * AI is clever, but it's not innovative or insightful. Thought leaders need to realize that while AI can be of use, it's their insights and experience that will really change the game.