‘AI won’t take marketers’ Jobs — Professionals with AI skills will’, says Ogunyooye

Head of Marketing at AXA Mansard Insurance Plc, Olusesan Ogunyooye, has said Technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are not going to replace marketers; instead, they will reshape the industry by creating new opportunities that only marketing professionals with technology skills can leverage.

He made this known during the MarTech Africa 2.0 conference held in Lagos recently.
Speaking during the Health Tech panel of the conference that had close to 500 marketing professionals, Ogunyooye noted that while marketing is fast integrating technology into its operations, Nigeria and most African markets are still at the nascent stage of the martech revolution.

“What we think we are doing with technology and AI and other techs in marketing today is nowhere close to what is possible when the full potential of tech is unleashed on our industry”, he noted. You only need to imagine what is possible when all our data becomes consolidated, when we truly have 5G in action, when our connected devices becomes marketing devices”.

“Imagine when a sick patient can call a doctor Alexa, the doctor assigns the patient to the nearest diagnostic centre in the hospital network, the doctor receives the patient’s report via EMR, the doctor prescribes medication, and the patients can have the medication delivered to her home and the patient can have follow up consultation through telemedicine. All these can be done with the patient’s privacy protected on a blockchain technology. And this is still scratching the surface in health tech”.

He said when the martech is fully integrated into the business environment, the evolving divides among the marketing functions will blur, noting that none of the digital marketing, growth marketing, tech marketing or any evolving marketing nomenclature can stand alone in the emerging marketing world.
“An ideal professional in the emerging marketing tech space will have above-average skills in the art of marketing, the science of data and the operations of technologies that can help accelerate marketing solutions. The people who should be worried about their jobs are those who won’t combine these three skills,” he said.

“I believe AI nor tech will not replace humans in marketing or any other field. But I must admit that they will reduce job opportunities as we know it, but create new jobs that we are not thinking about. For example, AI is already transforming content creation, media buying, customer segmentation, and even brand storytelling. What this means is that we might not need the number of people we used to need in these roles again. Take something like SEO, for instance; with the right level of technical prompt; AI can write better SEO content in terms of quality and quality. And when it comes to storytelling, you will agree with me that things are now really getting interesting. So it’s not that we won’t hire or promote content writers again; we don’t just need as much as we used to need to produce the number of articles or blog posts we used to produce”.

He said that rather than being afraid, feeling helpless, or resisting it, marketing professionals should seize the opportunity of this introductory stage of tech to upskill themselves. He, however, warned about mistaking Martech for marketing strategy.

“Technology is not a strategy. It will only accelerate your strategy and make it more efficient. A bad message will remain bad even if you distribute it with the best digital media and target the audience with the most accurate real-time data. A terrible product that’s distributed to millions of customers through tech will kill the company faster.

This is why I believe tech will not replace humans in marketing. Tech can gather data with amazing accuracy, and AI can analyze the data at the speed of light, but humans will still need to test, validate, and create solutions with the insights. “

Ogunyooye urged marketing professionals to see martech advancements as an opportunity to do more instead of a threat to their jobs. He added that organizations should also prioritize training and capacity-building to ensure that their teams are AI-literate and equipped to leverage data-driven insights from tech solutions.