Why Intention Will Be Central To The AI Economy

When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was asked about how artificial intelligence will affect the marketing industry, he said, “It will mean that 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly and at almost no cost be handled by the AI.”

Anybody who’s used an AI service can see what he means. With a simple prompt, we can use AI to generate ideas, produce creative images and videos, even to test the ideas against real or synthetic focus groups, exactly as Altman says. What he misses is that those things make up comparatively little of what marketing professionals do.

The truth is that creative work has been highly automated for some time, but, statistically, we’re not working any less. The problem is that, while machines can do much of our work for us, they can’t decide what work we want done. That’s why high-level jobs, both now and in the future, will center on identifying, communicating, coordinating, and executing intent.

Identifying Intent

In a military conflict, leaders determine where to concentrate their efforts by formulating the commander’s intent, or the desired end state, based on intelligence about the terrain and the enemy’s disposition on that terrain. Business leaders need to weigh similar factors, including the internal capabilities of their organization such as talent, technology and process, the market context and other factors.

The marketing world’s version of commander’s intent is the brief, which marketer’s provide to the “agencies, strategists, and creative professionals,” that Altman spoke of. In theory, you could just give that brief to an AI service in the form of a prompt and have it handled, as he said, nearly instantly and at almost no cost.

Yet anybody who’s ever taken a brief knows that’s not how it works. Marketers depend on those “agencies, strategists, and creative professionals,” for expertise and input. The vast majority of marketing budgets go to media placement (a 30 second spot in the 2025 Super Bowl cost $8 million), so the savings from eliminating humans from the creative process would be negligible.

Perhaps most importantly, any advice that an AI would give you would be necessarily based on training data from existing campaigns. To create something truly original and unique, you’ll need to explore new possibilities and experiment with different ideas until you develop something that stands out and resonates deeply with your customers

Communicating And Coordinating Intent

Humanity’s superpower is collective action. Many believe the reason religion has been so successful in all human cultures has less to do with superstition, which confers no competitive advantage to a klan, tribe or society, and everything to do with enabling large numbers of people to engage in complex collaboration.

Here again, Altman’s vision for the marketing space is instructive. Yes, you could have an AI create images, video and other content based on a single concept, but that same concept would have to be interpreted for myriad media formats and contexts, including for traditional media, podcasts, social media, and alternative platforms.

Each one of these needs to stay true to the original intent of the brief. Some elements of the creative vision need to remain consistent, while others need to be adapted for different formats and audiences. Decisions need to be made at every level, across a number of organizational boundaries and confirmed up and down the line.

This demands extensive communication and collaborative problem-solving, which rely on interpersonal relationships built over time. While automation can enhance accuracy and efficiency, it cannot foster trust and understanding. Humans need to do that on their own.

Executing Intent

Once you’ve effectively communicated the original brief to all of the teams working to develop and refine the message, you need to put it all out into the world. But here again, things aren’t as simple as they would immediately seem. At each step there are partners that can impose challenges and opportunities,

Consider that $8 million dollar Super Bowl ad placement. An AI can, of course, automate the process of identifying the opportunity and placing the ad, but that’s not what a capable and experienced marketer would expect from their partners. A seasoned professional would know to explore additional opportunities

For example, what digital and on-site opportunities could be combined with the Super-Bowl ad? What additional promotions with other partners can be designed to support and add synergy to the campaign. Are there opportunities to provide access to the game on site to key partners and other stakeholders?

These are all things that are developed through human-to-human relationships. AI can help augment the process, but it can’t replace it. Everybody at every stage adds their own ideas which point out challenges, provide new opportunities and drive innovation forward in ways that no single person or system could achieve alone.

Innovation Needs Exploration

When Christopher Columbus set sail in 1492, he was looking for an alternative to the Silk Road to reach India. He found America instead. In a similar way, when Jennifer Doudna set out to study an obscure defense mechanism in bacteria, she had no idea that she would discover the revolutionary gene editing technology we now know as CRISPR.

Yet it was their basic human yearning to explore that drove them to discover new things. Over the years, I’ve gotten to meet and learn from many genuine changemakers. Both of my books explored the question of what makes these people different. Time and again, I found that those who make an outsized impact start with a question they so desperately wanted answered that they were willing to devote years, even decades to the search.

Artificially intelligent systems do exactly the opposite. They train on data from the past and are able to create answers that far surpass any living person, or perhaps all of humanity. Yet, there are lots of things machines will never do. Machines will never strike out at a Little League game, have their hearts broken in a summer romance or see their children born.

Those may seem like trivial things, but genuine human experiences are crucial to shaping the yearning that forms the basis of intent. While machines are masterfully rational, humans are prosocial. We live for each other. We thrive on connection and purpose. That’s what drives us to delve into the unknown and discover new things that lead to bold, unpredictable leaps.

Therein lies the enormous opportunity of artificial intelligence. It’s not that it can give us all the answers, but that it can help us explore the questions that matter to us.

Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change and Mapping Innovation, as well as over 50 articles in Harvard Business Review. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.