AI and the Future of Marketing: Strategy, Human Value, and the CMO Role

John Jantsch (00:01.442)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Peter Benei. He is a marketing leader and strategist with 20 plus years of experience as a CMO for tech scale-ups and startups. He co-founded AI Ready CMO, a platform and newsletter focused on helping marketing leaders adopt AI strategically, not just tool by tool, but through frameworks, case studies and community learning.

Peter Benei (00:01.57)

Thanks.

John Jantsch (00:30.39)

So guess what we’re going to talk about today? AI. Peter, welcome to the show.

Peter Benei (00:34.634)

Welcome and thanks for inviting me.

John Jantsch (00:38.028)

So given that you and I were just talking off air, you know, I’ve got 30 plus years, you’ve got 20 plus years, how in your mind has, does AI or the advent of AI different than say, websites and social media and search, you know, that kind of came along as tool? Would you say that it’s just another flavor or is it fundamentally different?

Peter Benei (00:43.341)

Yeah.

Peter Benei (01:04.052)

both, I guess. I had my own agency as well. Jesus, 20 years ago. and it was a social media agency. So at that time it was like, so Facebook business pages just got introduced and everyone was talking about the clue train manifesto markets are conversations and you know, this kind of stuff, social media, web two. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the market or Brian Solis.

John Jantsch (01:05.879)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:19.584)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:24.384)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Benei (01:33.262)

Yeah, he was just about talking about the conversational prism and I don’t know. So everyone was talking about like, know, social media is a thing. And we had this agency, which was a social media agency. But again, that was a new thing. I don’t really think that the whole AI, whatever it is right now is…

John Jantsch (01:33.432)

Of course, yeah, Brian’s been on the show.

Peter Benei (02:02.4)

is new in a sense of tools and technology for marketers. These are just things that we need to learn and adapt to in general sense, like we did for, I don’t know, Facebook business pages at that time or, I don’t know, Squarespace websites. you can drag and drop websites again now. That’s interesting. Although I think the business model for agencies and marketing teams will be fundamentally changed

John Jantsch (02:22.53)

Yeah.

Peter Benei (02:32.184)

because of this new AI tool, AI capabilities, AI agent, whatever, AI. And I think that will be interesting to see. again, agencies also changed and marketing teams also changed 10, five, 20 years ago. So I think we just need to be familiar and open to adapt to this new change. So I don’t…

John Jantsch (03:00.31)

Well…

Peter Benei (03:01.078)

dramatize or strategize or panic around this. You just need to adapt.

John Jantsch (03:08.056)

Yeah, it’s funny. There was a period of time where you had social media marketing agencies and digital marketing agencies, right? It was just like, oh no, we’re this flavor. And now it’s just like, no, it’s all just marketing. Right. So what are the things you write about a lot? And, and I, you know, I’m a subscriber to your newsletter and I really, there are a lot of people out there writing about AI hype, you know, like look at what this thing could do. But I think you guys have take a very,

Peter Benei (03:12.206)

Hmm?

Peter Benei (03:19.693)

Yes.

Peter Benei (03:25.944)

Thank you.

John Jantsch (03:35.352)

Like you said, not necessarily a dramatic hype approach, a very almost stand back approach of saying, look, we have to remain strategic. Human beings have a role, but maybe it’s changed. And so I really appreciate that take. So let’s get in a little bit to the changing, like the AI plus strategy, you know, plus humans approach, because there’s certainly a lot of hand wringing right now around all these jobs that are going to be wiped out.

What are people going to do? So what do you, let’s just divide it. What do you think is going to go away that these tools actually do better than humans? And what do you think is going to actually stay and perhaps not for a long time be replaced by humans or by machines.

Peter Benei (04:05.486)

Thanks.

Peter Benei (04:21.922)

No, that’s a tempting and also interesting question. One thing that I want to reflect quickly, the focus on non-hype bullshit and sorry for calling that way, non-hype framing of this whole entire new trend was also personal choice of ours with the newsletter, but also a strategic choice as well.

Obviously everyone is hyping around this whole thing. we are personally, we are getting a little bit older, I guess. And we are just not interested in the, the, in the defocusing of our audiences. So we made the conscious decision to kind of like stand still and observe a little bit more with a strategic eye. So that’s one thing. Second.

John Jantsch (05:09.921)

Mm-hmm.

Peter Benei (05:18.232)

To your question, I would love to have an answer, but I’m not afraid to say that I don’t know. think during these times that are changing, it’s really hard to know what will happen. And we are just migrating, by the way, the news that are to another platform. And I had to reread the old stuff that we wrote. When I say old, like half a year ago.

John Jantsch (05:37.858)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (05:47.832)

All right.

Peter Benei (05:48.174)

And that will be a context to your answer, by the way. And I just read what we’d wrote like half a year ago and everything was so beginning at that stage still. Everything changed so fast within a couple of months. New tools came out, new concepts introduced to the public. And I’m not talking about like agents, like more like, know.

John Jantsch (06:04.375)

Mm-hmm.

Peter Benei (06:14.818)

working together with AI, human in the loop, and these kind of stuff. It’s so hard to predict because within this small time frame, everything has changed. I think what we can do to answer this question, and sorry for it, it takes a little bit longer, is that to nail down the basics that we think that it will be changing. And I think there are a couple of things that will change. And one that I’m…

almost 100 % sure it will change is that production of marketing materials and like marketing production in a sense, like content production, shall we say, will be either fully automated or it will not come with a high barrier of entry. It doesn’t have a high barrier of entry right now either, but it will have like a minimum barrier of entry with AI.

John Jantsch (06:54.614)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Peter Benei (07:14.254)

That means a lot for agencies, by the way, for marketing teams, because we create, mean, like 80 % of our work as marketers are creating content. Now, if the content creation is almost automated by AI, what do we do? Right? That’s the question. Now I don’t have the answer, but I’m sure that we won’t create that much and that amount of content within our workload and work time.

Second, AI is getting perfect or better, shall we say. It’s always, know, tomorrow’s AI is 10x better than today’s AI. But it’s still not perfect. And the reason why it’s not perfect is that it still needs the human, us, to course, supervise, review, edit, whatever. So I think the…

human in the loop or human in the addition working with the AI, it will matter for now, for a couple of years at least. And third, we need to think that if production is not our job anymore, but we still need it, then where do we need it? And I think that’s the answer for your question here, that we need to be able to form strategies.

And what is the strategy, by the way, understanding the client need with empathy and suggest process to achieve the goals. are goals and that’s it. Pretty much that’s the bare bones, simple strategy. How do we produce more? sorry. How do we produce better content? Because production wise, it will be automated, but it still has to be good. We need taste.

John Jantsch (08:56.45)

Right.

John Jantsch (09:09.698)

Right.

Peter Benei (09:11.106)

We need quality, we need judgment, we review supervision. And how do we work better with AI is that if we understand the workflows and the processes as a kind of like operator of the entire show. So I think strategy, like empathy, taste and operational efficiency or workflow knowledge should be…

and will be important for marketers. And I’m safe to say these.

John Jantsch (09:44.822)

Yeah, you, you. Well, and I think you raise a real, I think at least right now, one of the differentiators, the barrier to produce, to producing, quantity is gone. however, I think the barrier to producing quality is still a real differentiator.

Peter Benei (10:03.042)

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. agree. And it just, know, AI just like highlighted how not many of us have taste and how not many of us can produce great content and how most of the content that we’ve used so far anyway was, well, wouldn’t say garbage, but like, you know, mediocre. And I think it’s super important to…

to highlight that previously you needed resources to produce high quality content. So if you wanted to do a Super Bowl level advertising, you needed DDB or or or whoever big agency. If you wanted to do a global media campaign, you needed a media agency or an insane marketing budget to go with that.

John Jantsch (10:37.901)

Yes.

Peter Benei (11:02.638)

If you wanted to produce a content library of whatever you have, like 100 eBooks or shit, you need 10, 50, whatever, copywriters or marketers to do that. Similarly happening in other industries. So if you wanted to do the new John Wick movie, you needed a Hollywood studio and so on. can go on and on.

John Jantsch (11:18.338)

Thanks.

Peter Benei (11:33.184)

Now you don’t need these resources. You need a laptop and an idea and I don’t know, hundred dollars for API credits. And pretty much that’s it. That’s it. That’s all you need. And judgment and taste and strategic mindset. And, know, these kinds of stuff that are human in innate human values and abilities, which AI cannot produce.

John Jantsch (11:36.205)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (12:02.658)

Well, so that begs the question then, if we are going to still have humans involved, do we need different humans? A lot of us. If we built an organization, say, to produce stuff, you know, the copywriters, the graphic designers, that their whole output was the stuff, do we now need to hire for taste and for judgment and for brand intuition?

Peter Benei (12:17.602)

Mm-hmm.

Peter Benei (12:27.83)

I yes. I’m not the person who will tell you otherwise. And I’m also not the person who is in the business who helps you to do that. But if I would be in the business, I would immediately start some sort of like a training company or anything around that that helps people who have like basic skills through studies. Like, I don’t know.

John Jantsch (12:28.92)

the

Peter Benei (12:57.806)

creative arts or whatever, and upgrading them to be able to use those skills in a refined manner for multiple purposes. In our case, marketing. So yeah, people and companies should hire Prudence.

John Jantsch (12:59.661)

Right.

John Jantsch (13:13.496)

And I think I’ve actually seen on your website, aren’t you producing some courses or some master classes or something around those? Yeah, yeah, okay.

Peter Benei (13:21.302)

Yeah, we do some workshops. We do some workshops, but we are not a training company. So, so we didn’t within AI ready CMO, if you like pave to go to get a paid member, you obviously have access to some sort of like a workshop training program and some studies, but we are not a training.

John Jantsch (13:26.551)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (13:40.994)

Right, right. Yeah, okay. So, would you… If somebody was, I don’t know, maybe coming out of school now or maybe trying to change careers or something, are there some roles or functions that you would say, hey, you should spend your time up-leveling your skills in this area?

Peter Benei (13:42.924)

And I don’t want to be a training company.

Peter Benei (13:52.334)

Hmm?

Peter Benei (14:03.608)

So I’m 44. That will be a long shot, I’m 44 and many of my friends have kids who are like 15 or 10 or 15 or 20 sometimes. And they all talk about the same thing. I like full honesty.

John Jantsch (14:30.84)

Mm-hmm.

Peter Benei (14:33.39)

They talk about what will these kids will do in five to 10 years, what kind of careers they will pursue and so on and so on. They are families. So I usually talk with the dads, obviously, and they are talking about, I need to send my kid to a university or college or whatever. I live in Europe, so I don’t know, they send it to Vienna or something. And how…

How should I pick which university they should go in and so on and so on? How should I help them? And they are clueless. And usually the close to good answer that I see, and again, this is a personal opinion, so treat it as is, usually the ones that are sending their kids to some sort of like art, history,

John Jantsch (15:10.776)

Mm-hmm.

Right.

John Jantsch (15:31.512)

Mm-hmm.

Peter Benei (15:32.782)

Literally something around these like soft things, which we call soft skills or soft studies.

John Jantsch (15:37.376)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (15:41.495)

Mm-hmm.

Peter Benei (15:44.692)

I wouldn’t send my kid to engineering school right now. I wouldn’t send my kid to learn that become a developer or a lawyer or not even a doctor probably. I don’t think that these, I mean, these professions will exist obviously, but it will have a really huge competition that only the finest one will succeed or will be needed.

but if you have like a general arts degree or something around that, know usually, you know, treated as totally useless. I have one by the way. but still, so I studied history and sociology pretty much useless, I guess, but still. and I think these, these studies might be something that can be valuable because they, they teach you the basics of.

John Jantsch (16:22.922)

Right?

Peter Benei (16:43.64)

how to read, how to judge aesthetic things, and how to think critically, yes. How to think in context, so like historical context, let’s say. And I think these baseline knowledge skills, let’s say, I wouldn’t call them skills, but these things will be in, yes.

John Jantsch (16:49.89)

I to think critically.

John Jantsch (17:08.704)

It’s exposure really more than anything else, right? Yeah.

Peter Benei (17:11.746)

These will be inherently valuable than knowing the latest legal, whatever it is.

John Jantsch (17:14.274)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (17:19.308)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, which can be, yeah, queued up. How about CMOs? Are you, do you see that role going away? Do you see it, you know, changing inside of organizations to where it will not only look different, but it will have a different function?

Peter Benei (17:22.541)

Yes.

Peter Benei (17:38.232)

So we preach at AERA, the CMO is that the CMO role is becoming more like an orchestrator who is leading and creating these environments of workflows where people work together with AI and AI automation. And from the marketing org chart, like, know, junior, mid-manager, specialist.

John Jantsch (17:47.81)

Mm-hmm.

Peter Benei (18:07.128)

head off whatever and see. I do think that the CMO role will be the last one who will fall. Juniors probably will have the hardest time, especially, and also mid managers and specialists, because some of them need to pivot into something else because AI will just simply eat their field of expertise there.

but those people who are able to manage not just people, but workflows together. mixing the soft skills with, I wouldn’t say engineering level skills of workflow engineering, but more like, you know, operational level. I think these people will be valuable and these people will be the CMOs I think. But if you were a CMO and only created the marketing budget and.

John Jantsch (18:53.516)

Mm-hmm.

Peter Benei (19:06.306)

delegated the tasks and that’s it. Yeah, you probably will have a harder time in the upcoming years and you need to learn workflow efficiency, operational level execute and you know, these kinds of Or if you are on the other side, more like an operational person, you probably need to learn a little bit more soft skills and judgment and taste and you know, these kinds of stuff that we talked about so far.

John Jantsch (19:35.124)

So I want end on one kind of, there’s a bit of been a bit of a rant for me and I’m curious where you land on this. I think a lot of people were jumping at, my AI tool stack is these 17 tools because they all do one thing really well. And I think what I’ve said all along is I think the Googles and the Microsofts of the world are going to basically figure out how to build all of those best of class tools into their

Peter Benei (19:41.774)

Please.

Peter Benei (19:51.342)

Hmm.

Peter Benei (20:03.448)

Agree.

John Jantsch (20:04.696)

into their work tool that you buy for one price or that you’re already buying that now is just $10 more a month. And they will really kind of wipe out a lot of these one-off tools. I’m curious what you think of that.

Peter Benei (20:10.926)

I agree.

Peter Benei (20:18.094)

100%. I mean, this will be a hard argument because I 100 % agree with you. I can share you two examples. Two examples and one explanation on why people think that. I mean, especially, know, C level people and decision makers, they love throwing resources on problems. So yeah, they have like a tool.

John Jantsch (20:43.352)

Mm-hmm.

Peter Benei (20:48.174)

abundance, and they, and they buy shiny new tools every day. that’s fine. We understand it’s obviously not the right call. and even, even they don’t, they know it usually. and the two examples are, are simple ones. One, you actually mentioned off of air that you read the latest article that we, that we published. I mean, it’s not rocket science judge, just a Claude Cowork, came out.

John Jantsch (21:16.941)

Yes.

Peter Benei (21:18.282)

A funny thing, by the way, did Claude did it. mean, the Anthropic team did it with Claude code within half, one and a half a week. And no line of code were written by any engineers, all AI. So the learning there is that most of the tools will be irrelevant because startups

John Jantsch (21:29.848)

Mm.

John Jantsch (21:34.934)

Yes.

Peter Benei (21:45.674)

And AI tools just die every day because new tools will come out. Also don’t forget that the big ones, Google and the others, they have infinite resources, like infinite. They have infinite training data and AI lives on data. So just like one simple AI feature added to Google ads, let’s say.

We’ll probably kill 90 % of the AI tools out there right now overnight.

John Jantsch (22:20.972)

Well, they also, know, one thing people underestimate, they also have all the hardware.

Peter Benei (22:25.216)

And also the hardware. Well, in a sense business, that hardware doesn’t really matter that much, more like the data, but yeah, the hardware is important too. And the second thing is that, well, I’m really proud of it because it happened today. So sorry for sharing it with everyone right now on this podcast, but I built a content repurposing application. You literally, it does…

John Jantsch (22:26.584)

So it doesn’t cost them anything.

John Jantsch (22:35.49)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:45.208)

You

Peter Benei (22:54.956)

A simple thing, you give an RSS feed to the application, in our case, our newsletter. We are only two people. So we don’t have social media managers and stuff. And because most of the content that we do is news-driven, so every day we publish something new. We cannot batch write stuff pre-time. So we only know the content on the same day.

and we need to share it on X and everywhere. And we spend a lot of time to repurposing this type of content, even if we use AI. So this app actually takes everything that we have, new posts, and repurpose it on different platforms. It self-learns, it does everything. It’s fully automated, it’s amazing. It has a UX, everything.

and I built it under an hour while I having breakfast at my kitchen table. I’m not kidding. And I don’t know how to code at all. Like I never coded a single line of code ever. And I will probably never will. Claude did it. just why prompting it. So the reason why I’m telling this, thing is that it’s so easy to build up something new now.

John Jantsch (23:58.336)

Yeah.

Peter Benei (24:21.134)

even for personal use that you probably end up and that’s like a wild guess and more like a futurism. But I might guess that within a year or two, we don’t really even have like small sasses for most companies. People just, you know, ramp up their own applications for their own computer, for their own personal use, for their own agency, for their own clients within an hour.

John Jantsch (24:21.186)

Yeah. Right.

Peter Benei (24:50.508)

works fine just for them.

John Jantsch (24:53.016)

Yes. Yes, yes.

Peter Benei (24:54.382)

So it’s interesting. So short answer to your question. mean, don’t really bother subscribing to 20-something AI tools. Probably 95 % of them will be extinct within a year or two and substitute by Gemini or other Google products or whatever. Or second answer, build your own.

John Jantsch (25:05.237)

Alright.

John Jantsch (25:21.632)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I’m curious. And again, you don’t have to answer this. can end on this. But I suspect that Google will build a cowork clone, you know, because you think of all the people have all of their stuff on Google Drive, and not just to be able to say, here, go consume all this. You’ve got to believe that’s coming. Well, Peter, I appreciate you.

Peter Benei (25:31.853)

Yeah.

Peter Benei (25:41.25)

Yes. And by the way, it’s interesting. Sorry, last sentence. I have to rant about Microsoft a little. It’s so interesting that you have all the documents on SharePoints and all the knowledge documents and stuff, and copilot is still. So it’s so weird. Anyway, sorry.

John Jantsch (25:46.794)

No, yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (26:01.909)

huh. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

No, no, no, it has that typical Microsoft feel will land there. So Peter, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by. Is there some place you’d invite people to find out more about AI ready CMO?

Peter Benei (26:12.909)

Yeah.

Peter Benei (26:17.719)

Always.

Peter Benei (26:22.84)

Well, you just said it, AIReadyCMO.com. It’s free to subscribe. We share daily updates, daily intelligence. Every day it lands the one thing that you need to know about AI in marketing in your email box. Simple.

John Jantsch (26:25.954)

Yep, awesome.

John Jantsch (26:36.748)

Yeah, it is a newsletter that I read every day. appreciate it, All right, great. Well, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully maybe one of these days we’ll run into you on the road.

Peter Benei (26:42.476)

Thank you.

Peter Benei (26:50.358)

and anytime. Thank you very much for inviting me.

John Jantsch (26:51.797)

us.