👨‍🎓 Im happy to say I have just completed the 'Designing & Building AI products and services' course at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

🎰 I did my first course with MIT back in 2018, it was focused on the possibilities of Machine Learning, we had an intake of 500 and only 2 of us were in Marketing - there is something wrong with that! I wrote a piece back then about why Marketers should be studying Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning - you can read it here

🤭 It reads a little naive now, but the core intent is still apt, we as marketers need to know what tech can and can't do, through having an understanding of how the underlying principles work. You can't just rely on developer consultants or a Platform company - they will always sell you their product as the answer when it might only do 3 or 4 of the 10 things you need or have built in obsoleteness.

🌉 The bridge between the art of marketing and the science of tech tends not a very crowded one, and this creates issues. The biggest I see are tech being applied that isn't scalable or adaptive. This isn't by intent, or because the right tech isn't there, it's just a lack of connectivity between these two skill sets. Often the devs and development companies are being completely above board, but there are so many expectations that a lack of knowledge - on both sides of the table - leads to those dreaded moments 3 months in where the client says ‘oh, I didn’t realise it wouldn’t be able to do that?’

⚖ We need tech-marketers to sit on this bridge and analyse if the opps can not only improve the KPIs of campaigns or improve the efficiency of brand marketing operations, but also understand how they fit in to the current and future ecosystem of fcuuntionality and limitations.

It doesn't matter if it is GenAI Avatars, CoPilots, Agentic AI, Synthetic data systems or Insight it all needs to be brought back to marketing basics, fit into a KPIs framework and be future proofed against a complex eco-system.

👩‍💻 This particular course is built for technical product leaders or tech consultants who want to enhance their understanding of AI design processes. You do need some knowledge of calculus, linear algebra, statistics, and probabilities, along with basic Python experience, but if you're a marketer with none of those skills, I would still encourage you to give it a go, it will be a real challenge, but you will learn so much about what this tech can and can't do it will benefit you (and our industry) massively.

I can promise you, if you give this course a go you will not regret it.

If its a bit much for you, then contact me and I will give you some less technical courses to look at, but get involved, this Ai stuff aint going away and the more you know the more you will have an ability to be effective and valued - not matter what your role.