BrXnd NYC 2024 Recap // BrXnd Dispatch vol. 41
The day is done and it was amazing.
You’re getting this email as a subscriber to the BrXnd Dispatch, a (roughly) weekly email at the intersection of brands and AI. Wednesday was the second BrXnd NYC Marketing X AI Conference, and it was amazing. The fine folks at Redscout, a brand consultancy that advises brands at moments of inflection, wrote up some notes and takeaways that were worth sharing (particularly because I’m far too exhausted to think yet). A big thank you to Redscout and the rest of this year’s sponsors and attendees! This post was authored by Ivan Kayser, Redscout’s CEO, and Maddie Lawn, a senior brand strategist with a penchant for answering big questions and having creative conversations (with humans and AI).
“Take a deep breath and work on this problem step by step. I’m proud of you.”
Until yesterday, we never imagined saying something like this to ChatGPT. But now we are.
Why?
After a day packed full of insightful conversations with the amazing thinkers at BrXnd AI, we’re starting to realize how counterintuitive AI is.
It’s good at things you don’t expect.
It’s bad at all the things we've learned to turn to computers for.
So, we’re rethinking all of our instincts and giving some AI experiments a try:
1. We’re learning to be kind to AI. We’re going to say thank you, experiment with motivational phrases and praise, and explain why it’s so important it does a good job—testing and learning our way to the incentives that get AI to perform most effectively for our work.
It may sound funny, but AI is trained on human data, and humans are (famously) emotional. Those human emotions are baked right into AI’s worldview, so engaging with their feelings is a tried and true route to an AI that performs exponentially better, just for you.
2. We’re asking AI for more feedback. We’re going to make it a practice to regularly ask AI to check our work. ChatGPT, what does this piece of writing make you feel? Is there a clearer way to say this? How would you make this more conversational?
Most of us turn to generative AI for the obvious—generation—and find it’s not much better at doing the things we’re already pretty good at. What we all could use help with is making our own work better— so easing the feedback bottleneck many teams have is a place AI can make a big impact.
3. We’re giving AI a head start. We’re going to stop telling AI what to do, and start showing it how to do it. For every problem we ask it to solve, we’re including examples, and explaining how it should work through the problem. If we’d like the result to sound like us, we’re giving it an example of how we write. If we’d like an interview summarized, we’re explaining what we think makes an interesting soundbite. We’re getting more human in the way we ask AI for help, because exemplifying what good looks like has the power to make a generic AI think like a fine-tuned one.
4. We’re mapping our workflows for bottlenecks. We’re taking a closer look at the way we work, and identifying two things: the stuff we don’t like to do, and the moments that slow us down the most. Lon, arduous synthesis processes? High-touch, time-intensive edits? These repetitive tasks and recurring blocks are prime AI intervention candidates—because AI improves the most when you focus it on the same problem again and again.
5. We’re diving headfirst into creative overflow. Generative AI has ushered in an era of creative abundance, and we’re left with no shortage of ideas. Instead of walking away from the mess, we’re leaning in and learning how to sort through it—practicing pulling great creative out from the mix. Because AI is only going to get better, faster, and more adept at crafting complex outputs, evaluating creativity is quickly going to become a rarer skill than creativity itself.
A big thank you to all our 2024 sponsors, without whom I couldn’t pull this thing off. Airtable enables any team, regardless of technical skill, to create apps on top of shared data and power their most critical and unique workflows. The Brandtech Group The Brandtech Group is a marketing technology group that helps brands do their marketing better, faster, and cheaper using the latest technology. Brandguard is the world’s #1 AI-powered brand governance platform, Focaldata is combining LLMs with qualitative research in fascinating ways, and Redscout is a strategy and design consultancy that partners with founders, CEOs, and CMOs at moments of inflection for their organizations. Plus, big thanks to McKinney, Inuvo, Dstillery, Canvas Worldwide, and Persistent Productions. If you’re interested in sponsoring a future event (or doing one internally at your brand or agency), please be in touch.
6. We’re making AI our partner, not our magic wand. We are going to stop asking it to create final outputs, or solve big problems for us at face value—and we’re going to spend more time asking questions that expand our thinking. Weirder, wilder, provocative questions. What does authenticity look like in a texture? What is the shape of nostalgia? What about these ideas feels most original?
AI doesn’t make perfect products, but it can see a world of things we can’t—and it can help us see those things ourselves in really, really interesting ways.
7. We’re intentionally making room for surprise. No matter what, AI is going to come up with its own ideas. It’s going to take even our simplest requests and give us very, very weird answers. So, we’re rethinking which questions we’re asking AI to answer, and when in our process we’re asking—so we can embrace the hallucinations and let AI do its thing. We’re bringing AI in when we’re okay letting go of the steering wheel, and prepared to be pushed in another direction.
8. We’re looking for ways to be 10x better. AI is not designed for precision and accuracy. What it can do is democratize skills that make us 10x faster, 10x more generative, and 10x more capable.
So, we’re letting go of the idea that AI will make us 10x more efficient, and replacing it with the dream of being better. We’re looking to our process for places where AI can turbocharge, enabling newfound collaboration between all kinds of thinkers, and boosting our collective creativity in totally new ways.
About Redscout
Redscout is a brand consultancy. Since 2001, we’ve worked with established and emerging brands through points of inflection with winning brand strategies and world-class design, giving them the confidence to know which bets to make. We are also a proud sponsor of BrXnd.
Thanks for reading, subscribing, and supporting. It was so amazing to see so many of you in person.
Thanks for reading and coming to the event and supporting,
Noah