The New Rules of AI: Marco Andre on Transforming Modern Executive Leadership

Frank Wolf: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Aspire to Inspire Podcast. My name is Frank Wolf. I’m one of the cofounders of Staffbase, and I’m really happy to be here today with Marco Andre and talk about artificial intelligence and how it can be used in marketing, communication, and other fields. What are the learnings and also how to explain it to your leaders. Marco, really great to have you here. It would be great if you can briefly introduce yourself.

Marco Andre: Hi, Frank. Thanks for having me. I’m Marco. I currently work a lot on the AI space. I do a few keynotes. I speak, do workshops, and my focus is really helping leaders bridge the gap between business and technology right now. Other than that, as you can tell, I’m a big Lego lover, as you can see behind me. So that’s a very big part of my life and I literally cannot hide that.

Frank Wolf:  Amazing stuff. I guess a lot of time went into this. Do you know the hours? No, Lego lovers don’t count their hours.

Marco Andre: I can tell you some of these models, the ship there, it took like 60 plus hours just to build. They just add up.

Frank Wolf: Perfect. Is there any connection between AI and Lego that you know of right now?

Marco Andre: Interesting that you say that. I build Lego exactly because it takes me off screens. It takes me off connection, is a bit something that I can do with my own hands and then build, and then the output is mine, even if I bought it and if I follow instructions. So in a way people are thinking we’re all going to go AI, I think AI is liberating actually time to do things that are more about connection and human connection, and Lego, that’s something that it does for me.

Frank Wolf: It’s a great example. To explain, talking about will it take all our jobs or joy of life? No. Probably a lot of this, what craft is all about will hopefully stay here on, even after AI takes over a lot of other things. So if you talk about AI, there’s many things to look at. Let’s start at very easy and down-to-earth things. What are things that you’ve seen AI change in your very personal workflow or how you work or how your work day would go on? How do you use it for yourself, or the things that are on your plate every day?

Marco Andre: Two things. The first one is I use it to reduce the time I do spend on what I call brute force tasks, so admin tasks. If I need to do something that’s going to take me quite a lot of time, AI gives me a headstart on to do something like that. Imagine an email that’s difficult to write or a first draft for a newsletter or something that I would need to compare or go to different sources, and I get it all in one and I get that done much faster.

The second thing is a creative companion. If I want to edit a video, I now can do it. If I want to brainstorm an idea for a keynote, it’s almost like a second opinion or a coach, which I can have a first interaction with. And obviously then I can decide to show that to a human and discuss that with a human. But in terms of creative expression, it’s almost like one feeds off the other. I liberate admin time, which liberates energy, brainpower, creativity, which then when I want to go and do something creative, I also have tools to go much faster from idea to product.

Frank Wolf: Yeah, I think it’s one of the surprises of AI for a lot of people, because we thought of this as a technology, which would be more on the logical side of things, that this is a technology which really makes most of the very fundamental contribution on the creative side of things and really helps us in many ways, think outside of the box when starting a task or things like that. Is this also one of the reasons why AI is interesting for the marketing side of things in general for organizations?

Marco Andre: Yes, 100%. I think this is the most incredible time to work in marketing because what you have now is the things that used to be the admin part of marketing, now they can be done automatically. An example, Adobe Max launched something two weeks ago, which you do a design of a banner, for instance, and then you need to redesign it for every platform. Now you can do that to the touch of a button. In that part liberates time.

The second thing is in marketing, you can go from idea to concept, to product, to story incredibly faster, which, yes, some people say that a lot of bad content is going to be created. That’s true, but the average quality of content is going to go up, which means if we’re not using these tools to bring our product to market, by default, we’re going to be below average. So I think it’s a challenge for us as marketers, but for me, it’s an incredible time to be working in marketing.

Frank Wolf: Absolutely. On the creative side, I see a lot of discussions specifically in marketing of agencies saying like, “This is what we do,” these genuine ideas, these big ideas how to create a message or a campaign or a narrative around something, that this is still a human aspect of it, and then more as you talk about the execution of things and automating things and so on. Do you also see AI also doing marketing more on the creative side?

Marco Andre: I think there’s a lot of discussion right now if marketers need agencies and I think agencies will always be needed and a lot of partnerships will need to continue happening. Now, the question is, up until now, AI is good at coming up with different ideas in different ways to execute, but not the ideas itself. It might be that from the time when that happens, you will always need partners to help you execute. You will always need partners internally or externally to help you with the tools because we’re all learning new tools and you will always need partners to help bring the product to market.

Now, the decisions that a lot of leaders need to do right now is, “What do I keep in house? What do I outsource?” That comes from skill building, for instance. If I’m going to use Adobe Max as an example to have my teams doing the resizing of banners instead of an agency, that means I need to get Adobe Max, I need to train people on the tools and I need to design a career path for people that work in the organization, which is a fundamentally different way of developing their careers than, for instance, outsourcing that to an agency. But if you outsource that to an agency, we now know that that process of resizing for different platforms needs to be much faster.

I don’t buy so much into the, “Oh, is this going to disappear or this going to disappear? Is it going to transform?” But we as leaders need to decide what is going where.

Frank Wolf: Yeah. just staying with the example you just brought, because I think this is super interesting, what you’re also saying is as leaders, you should understand what AI does, because if you now know this latest innovation from Adobe, you can go back to your agency and say, “Hey, I know it’s happening, and I know you just cut your costs of producing all of this really down to 20% or whatever. I want to renegotiate the contract,” or whatever, to understand where the value creation is changing and where you can also create efficiency in the whole end-to-end process.

Marco Andre: It’s a very good point, Frank, because I think sometimes we’re a bit too rough on leaders. If you think about it, two years ago, no one was talking about this, about AI, at least at scale and speed you’re speaking right now, what we’re speaking about right now. Now it’s exactly what you mean. When I train in coach leaders, it’s not so much of the example, as you said, of Adobe Max, it’s the implications that it has in the value chain and how you do business. That’s exactly it.

If you show them an example of how today you can go with NotebookLM, you can create out of a website or a YouTube video, just a podcast of two people speaking, it’s not a gimmick. We’re talking about a fundamentally different way to consume and experience knowledge. And that’s what I try to explain to them.

Frank Wolf: Amazing. Just as an explanation for the ones who didn’t hear it, like NotebookLM is a service that Google launched,  Alphabet launched? From the Google universe, let’s put it like this, Alphabet universe. And it’s pretty much taking any document you have and converts it into a very real podcast where two people talk about this in a very smart way. I think it’s amazing.

I heard an example, an idea of somebody lately even saying, “Hey, can this go through the updates in my Slack or Microsoft Teams or whatever I have, what happened in the meetings on the day or week before, and when I go to work, I hear a podcast about, ‘Hey Frank, here are the top five things that you would need to know’?” It’s one of those innovations which opened a lot of minds about what AI is capable of, definitely interesting.

Marco Andre: I agree. It’s an incredible innovation. It was experimental and now it’s fully launched and I think it’s an incredible innovation.

Frank Wolf: Even more podcasts to head our ways in the coming years. We talked about marketing. Do you see the same happening in the communications function, which in a lot of companies, is very close to what marketing is doing, but focuses more on other audiences, it’s on employees, it’s on stakeholders, investor relations and so on as a marketing?

Marco Andre: 100%. I was discussing with someone the other day, a lot of comms is keeping a tone of voice internally and externally. And imagine right now you can have a large language model, internal, for instance, which you have all the comms from the last two or three years trained on the model. And every time you need to come up with something, with a new press release, with a new LinkedIn post, you can just have a first draft, but based on a number of ideas, the first draft is then exposed to three or four people for approval and that can all be done centrally.

If you think about that, you avoid corporate amnesia, you keep the tone of voice, which is so important for comms, you ensure that the right people see the right content. And then if someone leaves, obviously you don’t automatically lose the knowledge associated with that. So 100% applicable to comms. I would argue every function is really, really being affected by AI right now.

Frank Wolf: Talking about affected by AI, the whole discussion about, “Will it take my job?” I mean I know it’s a large range of what you’re working today and what your role is and so on. But going to marketing and comms, there are certain jobs which are more on the creation side like writers, or designers and others. Do you see certain roles where we can really say, “Hey, they are endangered, they might be really in trouble”? And are there other roles where you say, “They are totally out of range for AI for now”?

Marco Andre: I think what’s happening with AI, the cost of knowledge is coming down to zero. What’s happening right now is what happened with blue collar workers in the industrial revolution. And what that means for marketing is the first level is if in your job, if you’re a designer, a videographer, a copywriter, for instance, I would argue even a CMO, and you’re not using these tools, by default, you’re going to be falling behind. It’s like me saying that today, I don’t know how to use PowerPoint or Excel. I wouldn’t be qualified just to do the job of a business leader.

Now I don’t buy into this idea that these jobs are going to disappear. Historically, that has never happened. I think the jobs are going to transform. I think specifically, we are all guessing right now how our jobs are going to look like. I don’t think anyone has the answer. I think for marketing, what this means is, someone that I know the other day, they used a really good expression, marketing is going to be more about editors rather than creators, because now you have the tools and you can create so much content, but then what’s going to differentiate you, how you stand out is how you edit and bring that content into the world.

If you take that to your question, Frank, it’s exactly that. The videographer that doesn’t use these tools will be, by default, left behind. But I don’t buy so much into the idea that jobs are going to disappear. Yes, as you said, jobs that are closer that where the tools are very good at, they’re more in danger right now, but I think the jobs are just going to transform.

Frank Wolf: Yeah. It’s going to be very exciting to see how this plays out in the next couple of years. Great to be around all of this. I’ve seen in your LinkedIn profile, Novartis is one of your companies you’ve worked at, and I’ve seen you’re working there and working on employee experience, and I’ve seen the line, “Bringing marketing to HR.”

I also studied marketing, and I think if you come from a marketing background, it gives you a very nice and unique perspective on a lot of things in life. And it’s really helpful to apply this to communications, HR, and other things. That’s why I had to ask you, can you shed a bit more light on what marketing can do to HR? And maybe even if you have any thoughts on what AI can help in that process as well.

Marco Andre: There’s data that shows that the biggest driver of customer experience is employee experience, and HR is a major driver of employee experience. This is relatively empirical. If I want to give the best customer experience to my customers, but then if I, as an employee, I am not treated at the same standard, I don’t have the incentive to do that. That’s what I did when I was at Novartis in that job.

So if you think about HR, there’s a lot of things that happen every day in all the interactions between people that you can anonymize any kind of personal information, and you can drive insights that allow you to get a pulse of how people are feeling, and what are the message that you can push to them? That’s basically customer experience and insights, if you think about marketing.

The second thing is content. You want to have a one-voice communication with your employees that embodies the culture and the messages that you want to pass. And to do that, think about the example I was giving you, if you’re creating an internal newsletter, or if you’re doing communication with a certain employee, you can do exactly what CRM has done for marketing for the last 20 years.

And the last thing is, which for me was and still is the biggest opportunity to AI and HR, HR is plagued by 30-40% of admin work. Which means that people that work in HR, they don’t have time to do what drives them to the function, which is communication with people.

Think about if AI liberates 20% of their time on tasks that probably — imagine 80% of the questions asked are probably 10 in any given country. What if you could create a GPT with that, and immediately you get a question from someone and you get an answer going to the GPT, and you get a standard answer optimized in real time? That will liberate time for things that are incredibly more about human connection and I think that has an incredible impact on employee experience.

Frank Wolf: Yeah, definitely something that also a lot of our customers think about and thinking how they get this technology closer also to their frontline employees, everyone in their employee base. Definitely a big lever coming up there, yes.

You talk a lot about AI, also to leaders. Let’s say you have an average board member, CEO of a larger company you talk to, what’s the one thing, I wanted to ask, what they don’t understand yet about AI? Obviously they are all smart. They know what AI is, they see the potential. What’s the one thing they are typically most surprised about to learn or to get insights on? Or is there one thing?

Marco Andre: The thing that they normally ask me for help with is understanding how that will change ways of working across their value chain. They understand it. They buy it. They know that it’s here. They have concerns, ethical concerns, legal concerns, which are very rightful. But what they want is to help understand, one, how do they navigate that? And second, what does that mean for their teams and their jobs?

So examples, as we were discussing, how do they partner to get tools? Do they buy, do they build, or do they borrow? Second thing, how do they educate people at scale in a way that AI is just not a one-off thing, but actually they’re re-skilling the whole organization? Third, if we go function by function, what are the tangible changes and how they go to market? And fourth, which normally is also a big source of questions, is how do you continue to get insights from customers and consumers in a world where we won’t have as much access to, for instance, search insights?

Think about this. If in two years, someone is using an agent to buy something for you, Frank, I will be tracking the behavior of an agent and not your behavior. And if that is done within an LLM, if I don’t have access to whatever you’re discussing on LLM, as I have with search, not at personal level, how am I going to figure out what are you actually looking after and insights about you as a consumer? These are all questions, very rightful, that they have and that I can help try to navigate.

Frank Wolf: Super example. I think that it’s a nightmare for a lot of marketers and others out there, saying, you just look at agents which don’t give you a lot of data. If it comes like this, there’s a lot of power going to the AI agent companies, probably well understandable why a lot of money is flowing there right now in this regard.

Marco Andre: It’s like Amazon at a certain point, marketers that were marketing and distributing their products in Amazon, a key source of power in negotiating with Amazon was their data because they would have an incredible insight into consumer behavior. I think you’re right. It’s going to be exactly the same with any agentic companies or large language models.

Frank Wolf: You talked about leaders and the advice to say, “How can you bring in which tools?” and how to get this started. Are there best practices that you see of companies who’ve done this or started the program? I guess, all big companies in the world or pretty much all companies in the world are thinking about this. Are there specific examples where you say, “Hey, here are quick wins,” or, “Here’s some concrete ideas to make this happen”?

Marco Andre: There’s a pharma company called Moderna and they’re being used as an example inside and outside the industry, how they did this. If you read the case study they have with OpenAI, what they did was two years and a half ago, they created something called an AI Academy. And they went from the most senior people to the most junior people and they trained them on AI. I think that’s the first step, and the step that there’s enough data to show that’s not where we are investing our time and effort, at least not as needed as companies.

So what that turned into is they got an understanding across the whole organization and they were able to leverage this understanding from top leadership to drive initiatives that changed how they went to market. An example, I like to give examples on this to make it concrete, ln legal, they created something like Contract Companion, which is nothing more than a custom GPT, which you feed all of your information in previous contracts. You tell them what you need, like “Review this contract for me,” and based on previous information, flags any kind of disparities that might happen. That wouldn’t have happened if probably their leaders didn’t understand the technology and then become active champions of it.

Frank Wolf: Yeah, okay. Is there a market actually emerging from your perspective, if you take this program, probably a lot of education companies offering courses , lectures, and so on? Probably there’s a market coming for companies to build these programs with outside help, I guess.

Marco Andre: I think there’s a market coming for sure. I’ll tell you what are the things, from what I see, that are a gap. I think to talk about AI, we need to talk in a way that leaders understand. So we need to be business minded, not tech focused. That’s what I would say. And the second thing is examples, examples, examples. You need to show the examples and get them to interact with the technology. I explain generative AI in a very basic way, it’s AI you can talk and interact with, because AI has been here for many years, but you can’t interact with your Amazon recommendation engine or your Netflix recommendation engine.

The moment they see that this is something actually that you can do and interact with, they start understanding the technology. Then you expand that to what it means for them in terms of their own jobs, and then what it means for their team’s jobs and the behavior of their consumers or their customers. And that’s when the magic starts to happen, and I think that’s what we need to do more and more of.

Frank Wolf: Yeah. The Moderna example, and I think companies like Novartis and other pharmaceutical companies come from a very regulated background. And then from the outside, one would say, “AI systems have all these hallucinations.” It’s not a 100% answer every time, right? So there might be things that it gets wrong and so on. How do you see companies deal with that?

Marco Andre: I think we have a very deterministic approach to AI, which is wrong, that AI needs to be 100% correct. It is not, and I don’t think it will ever be. Humans are not 100% correct also. So it will always be a conjunction of AI plus human and the human is always responsible for the outcome. I think that’s how we need to look at it, is you will be able to get a headstart, you will be able to get a first draft of a document, or a policy, or a view of a contract, or a proposal review from procurement for three different vendors, but you always need to have a human verifying the output and being responsible for it.

I think if we do that in regulated industries, and also unregulated industries, I think it`s the same, we will have a way healthier relationship with AI rather than thinking, “Okay, I can delegate this 100% and not having to worry about it.”

Frank Wolf: I think it fits very well to your point earlier about you go from creator to editor, specifically to one of the learnings there, like AI can never replace the whole team, organization, whatever or so. It will shift jobs and roles in how they are done. Definitely super important point. Great. Talking about your experiences with talking about AI, and I would like to bring in one point that I see as one of the big challenges. I’ve actually made some research.

If you look at movies and books of the past years and you look at the role that AI plays in these stories and it starts with “2001: Space Odyssey” where an AI computer, HAL, goes rogue and tries to kill astronauts at some points, the interesting thing is the majority of these stories is AI turning bad at some point in the story and trying to kill humans and so on, like “Terminator” and other movies are well aware.

There are other movies where AI plays a good role like “WALL-E” and a few others, but it’s much less. My theory is in our collective mind, we think AI eventually, once it’s powerful enough, it’s going to kill us, right? I would say that’s a deep narrative we all have and it’s like a Pandora’s box thing. There’s this one moment when it does that. My theory is that’s deep inside all of us and that’s why it’s really hard sometimes in organizations to convince them because they say, “Hey, I have this big, deep underlying fear of the technology.” Do you fear AI in the same way? The second question, what would be your advice in an organization to talk about AI in a positive way?

Marco Andre: I think you have a very good point. I think it was even Yuval Harari that said the same, give the same example, how we grew up with the narrative, the Skynet taking over and everything. Do I fear AI? Yes, I do fear parts of AI. There are parts of AI that I think if they are not regulated or not controlled — for instance, the whole issue around deepfake, for instance, is profoundly worrying because we’re not never going to know what’s the true or not. Yes, I fear parts of AI.

Now, I also try to think, why do we fear AI? Because we’ve never seen anything coming at this so fast at this scale. But my answer to that is, what is the most healthy way to deal with it? If I just get stuck in fear and don’t help both myself and others, that’s not going to help me because this is not going to disappear. This is not going to go away. We have enough data to show that this is going to be with us for several generations.

What I try to do with organizations and with leaders is to show them the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good, because it can help them on their day-to-day. The bad, they need to be aware of it. And the ugly, they need to do something about it. So I talk about it, I have a narrative, a keynote I’ve been doing called “The Seven Cardinal Sins of AI,” which is showing that for some of these things, like bias, for instance, all the investment we are putting on this, hallucination, deep fakes, there’s also a side of how we can control it, how we can make it work for us. And that’s how I try to approach it, because if we get stuck in fear and we don’t do anything about it, by default, as we discussed, we’re going to be falling behind.

Frank Wolf: Yeah, it’s a great answer. So in terms of AI regulation, do you have a particular hard or soft point of view on that?

Marco Andre: It’s always a challenge, isn’t it? Because you need to have a balance between innovation and regulation. In Europe, we’re very good with regulation, but we come at it so fast that we stifle innovation, historically. I think we did a good job with the EU AI Act, putting guardrails in place ahead of time. We need to be careful that we also don’t stifle innovation.

So at this point, I think there’s parts of AI that need to be regulated. And not only that, pressure needs to be put on tech companies because it really is such a powerful thing that’s becoming a monopoly and that regulation needs to happen. Now, I think we also need to be very careful that that regulation doesn’t prevent people from using the tools, from re-skilling, because we’re facing the biggest re-skilling of the last probably 40, 50 years. And if we are doing that, if we’re not allowing people to re-skill, we are going for major societal and economic problems. So that’s my biggest concern with regulation.

Frank Wolf: Yeah, definitely a point specifically around Europe, if you want to be a part of an evolution or a development, if you want to influence it, you have to be an active contributor to it. Otherwise it’s others making the decisions, others will develop it, and you will definitely lag behind.

Talking about presentations, I wanted to ask you a personal question because I’ve seen you present at TEDx in Lisbon, I think in December this year. It’s a well-known event happening around the world at different locations where speakers come together. I think it’s usually 10 minutes a speech, sometimes it’s longer, I would be interested to hear. But it’s sort of the Olympic games for speakers where everyone tries to bring their best self and speaking skills to the stage. How do you prepare for it? What will you talk about and what can we expect?

Marco Andre: My TEDx will be about “The Seven Cardinal Sins Of AI,” as I just mentioned to you. The way I prepare is really, I think three things, is I focus a lot on the story. I really like to spend a lot of time thinking about a story and something that resonates with people. The second thing, and there’s no other way, I always laugh when people say, “Oh, this speaker is brilliant and that speaker is awesome and I bet they don’t prepare.” That is simply not true. So I over-prepare. I think about the narrative a hundred times. I practice my flow 200 times. Sometimes I go in the street with my headphones just for people to think that I’m not crazy and I’m just saying my narrative out loud.

And I think there’s also then on the day and the day before a very practical thing, which is to figure out that the tech is there, become friends with the people that are actually helping you with the tech because they’re incredibly important. Their job is incredibly important. And on the day it’s all about body and mind and being present. I do meditation, I stretch, I do pushups. I have a playlist just for the days when I do keynotes, which I blast on my headphones five minutes before going on stage because I really think it is a gift of people to me that they’re spending time to see me talking about something. So I have a duty to go there incredibly energized and give them that energy. That’s how I prepare.

Frank Wolf: Beautiful. Marco, thanks a lot for these personal insights. Specifically, I learned something that’s very helpful for me. I also prepare for presentations, walking the streets and talking loudly and I never wear headphones and people really think I’m crazy. I have to go to very lonely places otherwise.

I really like the headphone one. What’s also something we can learn is how passionate you are about the topic. I hear and I’ve seen a lot of feedback that you are an amazing speaker. So I guess whoever needs and wants a speaker talking about AI to their group organization is probably something that you might be able to help with. As I said, there’s a lot of good feedback on the web about you.

Great. Thanks a lot for your time. Very insightful, what AI means for us. I would sum it up for me, is a very positive, optimistic and energizing look at this. One of the biggest learnings for me also was this whole idea as a leader. One thing that you can do is educate your organization and the other one is on a very practical way. Look at your processes right now, what you’re doing right now, how AI is changing things there and be very open to look into these steps, and ask yourself what specifically are actionable points do we have that we can change here? Super helpful. Thanks a lot for your time and insights.

Marco Andre: Thank you for having me, Frank. It was a great conversation.

Frank Wolf: Thank you.