ABOUT THIS EPISODE
How to best use AI to identify unique insights and trends for your business
In this insightful conversation, Piers Fawkes, founder of PSFK, shares his journey from a writer to a trend analyst and discusses the evolution of gathering marketing insights and trends over the past 20 years. He emphasizes the role of AI in supporting trend analysis, but the importance of human input in generating actionable insights. The discussion covers how best to leverage these emerging automation tools (with some specifics mentioned) to enhance and speed up the process of trend analysis and insight generation. The discussion also touches on the changing landscape of marketing agencies and the impact of AI on consulting, culminating in a look ahead to the hopes and fears for 2025.
Key Takeaways
- Previously, trend reporting was quite manual (gathering of ideas, identifying patterns, sourcing data to back it up).
- The issue with future trend reporting is, there isn’t a lot of data to back it up as it’s an emerging concept to take hold at a future point. Therefore it requires intuition and leaps of faith which is very different to traditional market research.
- These days, AI can speed up the trend analysis processes significantly.
- However, AI is probably giving everyone the same, generic answers, yet with trend reporting, a lot of the value comes with providing thought-provoking, unique ideas.
- Therefore, Piers still believes in humans guiding a lot of the inputs and finessing a lot of the outputs of AI.
- You can train AI by feeding back your human-filtered results so it knows what to look for over time.
- AI helps to write good first drafts, but the output currently needs to be edited.
- In the future, humans could be seen as the orchestrators, and the AI the agents to execute.
- Insights must be actionable and unique to be valuable.
- The role of the CEO is increasingly intertwined with marketing, therefore it would benefit agencies to be in touch with the CEO (versus just the CMO).
- The future of work will see a shift in middle management due to AI.
Chapters
02:31 The Evolution of Trend Reporting
04:42 The Role of AI in Trend Analysis
07:16 Human Versus Machine-Generated Insights
09:24 Balancing Work Done Between Human and AI and Optimising AI Overtime
14:07 The Impact of AI on Consulting and Agencies
16:40 The Future of Work and AI's Role
19:06 Tools and Technologies in Trend Analysis
21:25 The Changing Landscape of Marketing Agencies
23:42 Looking Ahead: Hopes and Fears for 2025
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