This week I spoke with Jon Chiriboga, Director of Marketing Innovation & Digital Excellence at AstraZeneca about how AI is impacting his work. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Jon over the years, and he has loads of experience leading digital transformation from within large organizations. He discusses how he applies lessons from those earlier initiatives, as well as tips on using tools like Gemini Notebook, Synthesia, and HeyGen. Jon also shares how AstraZeneca is building AI adoption through a comprehensive tiered learning program that ties tool access and recognition to completion. It’s a great snapshot of client-side AI transformation – thanks Jon!
The AI Optimization Trap
I’m currently working on a consulting project where we are exploring how AI can help improve business performance for a large team. With this kind of work, the tendency is to be laser-focused on efficiency. How can we optimize existing processes to be faster, more automated, and less expensive? Research shows that efficiency is the area that leaders are most focused on when it comes to AI, however it can be limiting. Starting from the current process only leads you to a faster version of it.
So, if you’re going to the effort of stepping back to rethink your operations (first off, good on you) - step way back. Don’t frame the challenge around optimizing an existing process, try to frame it around improving an outcome.
Here’s what I mean. Take a weekly performance report. If we just focus on optimizing the process of producing it, we’ve narrowed the scope before we’ve even started. The report has been the best solution for years, but is it still, now that AI is available?
Try to start with the purpose the report serves. It’s probably to inform a decision. So - who needs to know what, by when? Once that’s clear, we can explore what limitations AI might now remove. Maybe the answer is real-time data. Maybe it’s a trigger-based notification. Maybe the report still wins.
Then we can work out the steps, considering AI along the way. The new process may not look like the old one. Some steps might disappear entirely, because they only ever existed to produce the report. You may end up with a better outcome, and a different, more efficient path to it.
AI & Tokenomics
My “AI bill” has climbed steadily over the last year, and I’m just one person. How do you manage that in a large organization, especially while encouraging people to use AI more? Companies in the top 10% of spending run $660/month per employee (the top 1% is $7.5k!) This Accenture piece on tokenomics is a useful read if you’re a leader trying to figure this out. Or maybe you’re not spending enough? BCG reports that companies being too cautious are falling behind, with higher token usage associated with stronger revenue growth.
AI in Charts
Agentic Transformation (Deloitte): Organizations feel like they have the agentic AI vision and the technology sorted. It’s those pesky humans (workforce and business processes), they haven’t got around to yet.
AI & Employee Engagement (Gallup): Organizations that provide those humans with direction on AI use, and have managers who actively support their teams using it, have more engagement.
AI Resources
Best Practices for GenAI in Ads (UK Advertising Association): For any advertisers or agencies that are trying to figure out and codify their AI guidelines, this industry document is a helpful resource.
Workflow Hub (The Rundown): One I’ve bookmarked: a site where marketers share their favourite AI workflows. Worth a skim if you’re looking for new ideas.
Confessions of a 10X Employee (David Chestnut): Love this post on AI adoption with useful advice for how to support those individual employees who have become extremely AI-proficient (hint: it’s not giving them more work!)
Cool Beans
Hot or Not & The Modern Web: Anyone remember swiping through Hot or Not in the year 2000? Anyone remember having their picture uploaded by a colleague and getting a rating of a 4? Asking for a friend.
Delivery Drones! DoorDash is launching delivery drones. Uber plans to do the same. Amazon has been at this for a while, including dropping a package directly into a customer’s pool.
Pun-Tastic Branding: An outstanding collection of local businesses that use puns in their advertising. My favourite is Flooring Contractor Lino Richie – “Hello, is it me you’re looking floor”
Centaur Robot: Check out this three-halved, four-legged superhumanoid general purpose robot that has a horned goat head and glowing eyes that can operate a chainsaw. Yes, I just typed that.
