To say Paul Roetzer was ahead of the curve on AI is a gross understatement.

In 2016, he founded the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute – six years before ChatGPT shook up the world. In 2020, he launched the Marketing AI Conference (MAICON). He is the co-author of “Marketing Artificial Intelligence: AI” and “Marketing and the Future of Business,” and host of “The Marketing AI Show” podcast. He’s an in-demand speaker focused on making human-centered AI approachable for business leaders.

And, his phone has been buzzing non-stop since ChatGPT launched last November. Within two weeks of its launch, he was on calls with “the heads of the biggest VC firms in the world, CEOs of publicly traded software companies, deans of colleges, presidents of universities -- everyone,” he says.

“All of a sudden, everyone wanted to talk at the same time because they realized what was about to happen -- but they didn't understand why or what the technology really was.

In 2022, Roetzer’s podcast had 5000 downloads; so far this year it has 150,000. The Institute’s AI class has grown from 300 to 700 per session. In 2022, he did 10 speaking engagements. So far this year, he has done 50. Fortunate for Clevelanders: On September 19, he will be the keynote speaker at the COSE BIG Summit.

“Everything has changed,” he says. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my 23 years in business.”

Roetzer recently took time out of his busy schedule to talk about the radical changes rocking the world – and how businesses can learn, adapt and thrive with AI.

I first heard you speak about AI at the 2022 MAICON conference in Cleveland. A LOT has changed since then. Were you expecting this?

I expected it a lot sooner than 2022, but I would say I don't think anyone really expected the explosion that occurred with ChatGPT
I didn't know when it would occur, what the tipping point would be, but you know, I kind of staked everything on it. I knew that this day would come, and AI would be the center of everything. It's why I started the Institute in 2016. But it was a slow organic process until ChatGPT showed up and changed everything.

How can businesspeople start educating themselves about AI?

The key is to give smart people with domain knowledge -- people who think about their industry, their company -- give them the fundamentals of what AI is and how it works and how it can be applied and let them start thinking about their own business differently.

At the Institute, we have devised a very specific step-by-step learning journey because we realized that, when we launched our online Academy in 2020, there were 35 courses, but people didn't know what to pick. Many people weren't really sure what they were looking for or what exactly they even needed to know. So, we created the Intro to AI class. It is free and it's 30 minutes long -- once you understand this now you can go and pick your own learning journey.

Once people have a base level understanding, we can connect the dots on the future of business. Much of what we do is teach people to think about problems differently, to think about growth differently. And that's what AI enables -- once you understand it.

You have written that ‘the future of business is AI or obsolete’? Can you expand on this?

After Dall-E came out in 2021, after image generation became a thing in AI, I wrote this thesis: ‘The Future of Business is AI or Obsolete.’ The basic premise is that every business in every industry is either going to be AI native, so they start and build a smarter company from the ground up that's infused with AI, or they become AI emergent, meaning it's an existing company with existing talent, tech campaigns and data, and they find ways to infuse AI into all aspects of that business.

The companies that don't adapt to AI will become obsolete, and it will vary by industry how quickly that occurs.

What industries do you predict will be most radically impacted by AI – and who might it affect first?

Software certainly. It’s already happening. It became, overnight, really challenging to know which software companies are going to be around a year from now. That’s certainly massive impact.

Retail was an early adopter going back the last 10 years.

The ones that I worry about the most are professional services, anything related to that. That could be law, accounting firms, marketing agencies, consultants.

There’s very limited understanding of the impact it's about to have.  They way I look at it is, there are 132 million full time jobs in the United States, and 100 million are knowledge workers, people who think and create for a living. Anyone who considers themselves a knowledge worker will be impacted in the next 12 to 24 months, significantly. Now, impact doesn't mean you're going to lose your job, but it means it's going to be a part of what you do.

 When I think about industries, I also think about healthcare, which is certainly going to be a huge one in Cleveland. We’re seeing that already with the Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals.

What are the biggest challenges of AI for corporations and business leaders -- and the potential benefits?

The biggest challenge we continue to see is a lack of understanding of what it is. So, what we've been working with big companies to do is build AI councils. You start with education; you have to level the playing field within the organization and provide education and training to your people about what AI is, because a lot of them are afraid for their jobs, they're afraid for their futures -- there is a fear factor that comes in. You have to get through that by providing transparency and education.

Then the next step is you build an AI council, you get cross functional people within the organization. You want to come together and solve for this -- to figure out the future of the company, and then from there you can actually get into building a road map for how you're going to integrate AI into the organization and how you can use it as a competitive advantage moving forward.

What’s next for you and the Institute?

Marketing was the obvious starting point for me -- I had a marketing agency, I'd written marketing books -- but my interest has always been much broader than marketing. I always saw the institute as a bit of a steppingstone to create awareness and interest in the bigger topics of AI: job disruption, the impact on the economy, disruption to educational systems, ethics, responsible AI across society.

My basic feeling is we have to do more to ensure the positive use of AI throughout society, including businesses and schools and governments, and marketing is piece of that story.

Do you have advice for companies creating AI ethics policies?
It is becoming standard practice that companies come up with AI ethics policies and guidelines. We recommend two steps.

One is responsible AI principles. We have created a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license version that people can use as a template. Ours includes 12 principles and the basic premises that has to be human centered.

So, you can look at AI and say, ‘oh wow, we can cut 30% of the time we spend to create a widget or to provide the service. We don't need as many people.’ Or you can look at and say, ‘wow, we can save that 30% and we can redistribute that time and those people to these things that we've always wanted to do, kind of a wish list or a sandbox of ideas.’

I think the best companies will always solve for the humans at the center of everything they do, because that's going to be the challenge, especially for big corporations and private equity- backed companies, who could take the quick win of reducing expenses by reducing people.

Human-centered policies are critical because they will guide the organization and share with your team the vision for how you're going to play this out.

Generative AI policies are also essential because they dictate how people within the organization use language and image generation tools.

We have AI that can create all these outputs, and most organizations have yet to define for their employees how and when these tools are allowed to be used. That to me is an essential step to take.

If somebody knows nothing else about AI, what one thing should learn right away?

At a practical level, they just have to learn what it is and what it's capable of doing. It’s the most important first step, because once you understand AI, it gets demystified. You get rid of the sci-fi feel of it. You get rid of the abstract feel of it, and you start to realize like it's already present in your life, you've been using forms of it for the last decade, in Gmail and Netflix and Spotify and TikTok.  It has been infused into the software we use to run our companies.

The thing that people need to know now is: it is going to be infused into everything we do in the next one to two years, whether you want it to be there or not, because the Big Tech companies have bet their futures on this.

 People who are willing to just figure this stuff out and get through that uncertainty are the ones who are going to have tremendous opportunities for growth and innovation.

Learn More at Paul's BIG Summit keynote