LIVE FROM MWC LAS VEGAS 2024: A panel of CMOs kicked around the topic of generative AI during a panel discussion: it was no surprise they largely found it transformational.

Randi Zuckerberg (pictured, middle), CEO and founder, Hug and Zuckerberg Media, recalled when she got a job 20 years ago in Silicon Valley that marketers needed to have “sidekick energy” because they were not the main characters in an organisation.

“I actually had an engineer at one point tell me that they thought marketing was like the catfish that soaked the scum off the bottom of the pot. Like someone actually said that to me,” said Zuckerberg, who was the first CMO of Facebook. “I’ve watched in those 20 years as technology has evolved, and now the marketing team and the CMO are almost like one of the most entrepreneurial functions inside of a company”.

Zuckerberg is such an avid user of genAI she thanks it out loud for when it resolves problems or comes up with creative solutions.

“I feel like I’ve been able to try my hand at so many different mediums and excel at them because I have AI as my ghostwriter and my copilot,” she said.

Ami Badani, (pictured, left) CMO for Arm, explained her company’s focus is on what genAI can enable and not getting caught up in the hype.

“It doesn’t matter as much as to what the technology does. It’s what the technology enables,” she said. “What we’ve been trying to focus on is not sort of the bits and the bytes, but really what our platform enables. And we’ve seen the impact of that resonate incredibly well with customers, investors, partners.”

She stated using genAI has made her a better storyteller.  Badani uses it to conceptualise complex documents down to 5-minute podcasts to better understand topics.

Badani also noted genAI empowers CMOs to move beyond being specialists into becoming generalists with a range of knowledge across more topics. She uses ChatGPT to drive PR headlines.

Geoff Hollingworth,(pictured, right) CMO for Rakuten Symphony, stated “AI is industrialising creativity,” which enables him to overcome creative deficiencies.

“Now I have this planet-sized machine where I can interact in real time and replace my deficiency on creativity and scale where I’m not very good,” he explained. “That’s been a revolution for me.”