Elizabeth Shaw has worked in emerging tech for nearly 25 years at companies including Gartner, Sephora, and Forrester. Now, she’s your new guest lecturer in Section’s AI Crash Course.

So we sat down with Elizabeth to learn her perspective on the future of AI, especially as it relates to marketing, strategy, and consulting. Read on for her insights including:

• The marketing roles that are most anxious about AI
• The AI use case that has changed how she works
• Why the parts of AI no one is talking about are the ones that excite her most

Give us the Elizabeth synopsis. What should students know about you?

I have 24 years of experience in emerging tech as an emerging tech marketer, as a practitioner and an analyst at Forrester Research and Gartner. I've also built innovation labs for brands like Sephora and Constellation. I've been through the advent of web, social, mobile, VR, AR, RFID, and now I’m laser focused on generative AI. That’s a long way of saying ‘I feel like I've walked a mile in every marketer's shoes’.

I’ve always had a passion for the intersection of emerging technology and consumer behavior. So when generative AI took off, I knew I needed to lean into upskilling myself into that technology and understand how marketers harness it to enable their teams and supercharge their own career paths.

I've been running my own consultancy on and off for about four years, first creating voice experiences with conversational AI for brands like Warner Music and Dua Lipa, and HBO shows like Game of Thrones. Now my focus is on building AI literacy – helping brands identify their top use cases and how to upskill their marketing departments.

How did you get started with AI?

AI is nothing new for marketers, really. I’ve been working with predictive analytics for years. But when Generative AI came out, it was an oh my gosh moment.

I’m not a programmer, I’m super lo-fi and right brained, but now I can put a simple text prompt in and get a book out that I can read to my kids before bed with pictures. That blew my freaking mind. So I joined Section right away.

I took courses right away, I joined the Marketing AI Institute right away – fast forward, I was a keynote speaker at the Marketing AI Conference, and now I'm now teaching with Section. It was, and still is, clear to me that AI is very much the next wave of technology I need to be paying attention to.

What do you think is the most exciting thing about AI right now?

From a creative perspective, the video, audio, and other outputs of AI aren't talked about as much as text outputs. So as a consumer, I don't know what that means for my future. How will I engage with brands? What will be the type of content interfaces and ways by which products and services will be marketed to me? I literally don’t know what that looks like.

We're not talking about that yet. Nobody is actually talking about what consumers want from this technology. It's so focused on what we can be doing as a business to take advantage of the cost optimization, new potential for products and services, and innovation.

And, in that vein, if AI becomes such a big productivity gain, where does everybody's time go? How are strategists and companies thinking about this gained muscle power that they're adding by subtracting mundane tasks that have always weighed us down? If you now have the 100% potential of a human worker that has been unleashed, what does that look like?

That to me is interesting – and I don't know. If somebody were to say to me definitively ‘this is what it will look like’, I would call bullshit on that. I don't think anybody has any clue, and that’s exciting.

What is your favorite use case for AI?

Oh my god, a strategist – 100%. As an analyst I've done so much competitive research, market analysis, built go-to-market plans, etc. And the amount of work that I’ve been able to accomplish in such a short period of time with AI on something that would have taken me weeks –  it was such a joy.

Recently, I’ve spent more time fact checking AI than doing the actual legwork. It's incredible to me to be able to do that type of research so quickly.

You consult with companies about how to use AI. What are the biggest hesitations that you hear and how do you respond to those?

Creatives are freaking out. They really think that – of all the people within marketing – their jobs are on the chopping block. What happens to the creative director? What happens to the social media and content managers? I think those are still big question marks.

And I think in every company I work with, whether they want to call it a ‘copilot’ or an ‘assistant’, there’s a focus on determining the language that they use consistently with their teams to emphasize that this is not going to replace them, but it's going to enhance their job.

And that this is the future! You're at the very cusp of this, and we want to provide you with the tools, resourcing, and upskilling to invest in your future as a professional. So it really begins with an assessment of the excitement vs. the angst on teams, and then how can we build a narrative for you as a leader to share with the C-suite and the board and make sure everyone is speaking the same language.

Without that, it gets out of control because that's where you're going to get rumor mills. That's where people are going to freak out and start applying for other jobs. So that tends to be where we start.

What are you most interested in imparting on students as they start their journey with AI?

Enthusiasm. There's obviously risks – it's early days and making sure that people understand what those are is key. But to me, there's really nothing more exciting than being on the advent of a technology as transformative as this.

Mobile was huge, social was huge. But this technology in particular is unlike anything I think we'll see see in a very long time – and to be at the very beginning of it, I think people should pat themselves on the back for taking the initiative to sign up for a course, roll up their sleeves, and get started, because they're going to be ahead of the curve.

‍

To learn more from Elizabeth, sign up for our final AI Crash Course of 2024.