Anthropologist In Tech: Marketing Strategies Catering To Diversity With Anne James
Diving into the evolutionary phase of technology in many industries, what is it like to welcome an anthropologist in tech? Anne James brings so much value to developing marketing strategies that cater to diversity and still achieve their objectives. As she navigates through neurodiversity, she sheds her expertise and wisdom to bring light on how supporting folks in a safe environment for everyone is key to growth in the tech industry. Anne also touches on the disability tax. Learn more about building a safe space for everyone by tuning in to this episode with Anne James.
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Anthropologist In Tech: Marketing Strategies Catering To Diversity With Anne James
We have a special guest here, Anne James. Anne is a marketing expert, but what sets her apart is her unique blend of expertise in anthropology and digital wisdom. You can call her the Indiana Jones of the tech world, exploring the depths of human behavior in the digital age. In this episode, we’ll dive into Anne’s journey and experiences in tech. We’ll talk about the power of diverse perspectives in tech, and we’re going to challenge some common mix about “work-life balance.” Of course, I couldn’t persist in asking Anne about her thoughts on AI. She’s a cultural scientist, so I thought she’s probably the best person to ask what or how she feels about AI or its impact on our society. Grab a snack and your favorite beverage, and get ready to explore the fascinating world of anthropology in tech with Anne James.
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Anne, how are you?
I am doing pretty well. Thanks. How are you?
I am good. I'm glad we're finally sitting down to have this conversation. Let’s get started. Tell me about yourself. Tell me how you got to where you are now. Tell me the highlights from your journey so far.
I'll do the visual description thing first. My name is Anne James. My pronouns are she/her. I am a White Portuguese-American woman in my mid-30s with short black hair. Sometimes, my hair is bleached blonde or some other wacky color, but it's black now. I have ended up in marketing strategy, as well as hands-on execution for companies of all sizes, but most often tech startups.
I had an interesting journey getting here. I didn't do any kind of technical degree. My undergraduate degree is in Anthropology and one of my Master's degrees is in Cultural History. It’s an interesting path. I started my career out in publishing and then made my way into the tech space. The last five years have been very focused on product marketing for tech startups or organizations that have disruptive tech that is entering a new evolutionary phase for their company.
Someone who did a Bachelor's in Computer Science and then a Master's in Computer Science, and then here, your background is very interesting, to say the least. Could you elaborate on how your past experiences and expertise in the fields of anthropology and cultural history have influenced your strategies and techniques when it comes to marketing and product management? I'm interested to learn how your unique background has shaped your approach to tech.
I started off by saying I've had an interesting path, but anthropologists and tech go together like peanut butter and jelly. There are hundreds of us working in tech today, but we're probably hiding in plain sight under different job titles. One of the things that anthropologists are good at is the futurism space. They can help a company understand new applications for technologies or how disruptive tech is going to play out over time.
One of the other areas is the ethnography branch of anthropology. That's trying to understand the connections between individuals in a society, like what's going on with their cultural norms and their values. That's the area that I studied heavily for my undergrad. That fits in well with design thinking. You might see an anthropologist doing UX, trying to get users down the happy path more effectively and get them to take desired actions in a SaaS platform. You might find an anthropologist working in company culture. They are trying to figure out what's going to get people to stay with a company and innovate together as a team.
When I first started my career in this space, I was very much in that design thinking zone. It's not just product design, UX, and all that, but also streamlining business processes and trying to figure out how to get users to value faster, things like how websites should be organized, and colors and layouts for ads. Different personas will react to different colors and layouts in different ways. That's very interesting from a psychological perspective.
A lot of marketers will start with an instinct, and then they're trying to prove their instinct correct by finding the data to back it up. It is a little bit of a dangerous thing because data is so easily manipulated to give you the answer that you want. For me, I'm always very cognizant of that. You need to start with the right questions. You're trying to get to that point of understanding, so you don't want to reinforce a preconception that you have. You want to be as objective as possible. That comes from the scientist’s place in me.
Now that I'm more than a decade into my career, and I'm oftentimes dealing with founders who are looking to me to give them a bigger picture and a strategic view, I am enjoying the positioning work with tech companies. Trying to figure out a company's place in a value system in the community that it serves is interesting. The AI and machine learning community or the developer community have their own norms of behavior, their own value systems, and their own tone of voice that they use to speak amongst themselves.
A company can make a decision like, "We're going to either quack along with the other ducks and try to fit in with this," or you make a decision, "Our strategy is going to be to stand out and subvert those expectations." I would be the person who comes in and helps a company figure out that path and make the decision of which one of these is the right one for us. That comes from doing a lot of research into what's going on in macroeconomic factors, market push and pull things, user communities, and all of these different sources of data. I am pulling that together to create some kind of guide for the company of where to steer.
I believe in qualitative as much as quantitative, so I'm listening to all different types of channels. From the outputs of this, I shift into my cultural historian mode a little bit because I'm trying to craft a narrative. Storytelling is a huge passion. One of the things in academic historiography and this practice of writing history is that writing is so inaccessible and so gatekeep-y. It's almost intentionally dry. There's a very specific language. It's not something that the average person is going to pick up in an academic journal and enjoy that type of writing.
My Master's thesis in History went against this whole thing. I very intentionally brought in a lot of humor and a lot of sarcasm. It was a fun thesis to write and for people to read as well. I wanted it to be accessible in simple language, and go against this whole academic language. That got me into a bit of trouble with my school. It made me realize that my place was not in academia.
I'm much happier in the tech space because I get to bring in some of that fun and that humor. One example of this is winning Google Adopt A Startup. At Google's European headquarters, it was this Shark Tank. It was very high pressure. You're pitching your company to the media and other Googlers. It's a tense process that you go through.
In the presentation at the end of that which I did with one of my colleagues, there was a lot of humor, humility, and honesty about what a tech startup goes through on its journey, like how many times you have to stumble before you find your path. Hearing 400 people laughing in an auditorium is the most incredible validation as an anthropologist. You're like, “This is resonating. We're having a shared experience here.”
That's very interesting. I am feeling such appalled to ask you about your thesis and what that was about. Sarcasm and humor, I love that. That is my medicine for a bad day or anything in general. Can you quickly touch on that?
On the surface of things, I was talking about this motif of Salome, this killer female or femme fatale person. It was specifically Oscar Wilde's version of Salome where she becomes this embodiment of all of the things that Victorian men were afraid of. There was this movement toward women's suffrage and women wanting to enter the workforce. All of these things were bubbling under the surface around the 1890s or so when Oscar Wilde was going through the pinnacle of his career. This figure comes up over and over, not just in his work, but in all of the writers around this time period. That was the subject.
The writing itself was a very conscious pointed critique of academic writing. I wanted it to be like a bestseller. I wanted it to read like something that you'd go to Barnes and Noble and enjoy, and you don't have to be a Master's. I feel like this is the problem with the humanities. We've created these ivory towers. People in the STEM space are saying, “Humanities degrees are useless. Look at these people. They're off in space.” We have to think about bringing some of this language down to earth and making it more accessible and engaging with people a little bit more.
I'm sitting with that. There are so many things I want to ask you in there.
Where this leads to, there's a really good example, which is what's happening in AI right now. You have these tech giants who previously had teams of anthropologists, social scientists, and folks working on ethical AI. Now, those teams are being dismantled. You have the godfather of AI coming out and disavowing his life's work to some degree. The response to that is, “These folks are confused.” They're like the guy on the street corner with his little cardboard sign yelling about the apocalypse. There's a very condescending language around folks who are raising concerns around AI, and these are humanities folks. We have backed ourselves into a corner where we have to do a little bit of deep thinking. We need to engage with people more because this is a perception that's being put out there.
That reminds me that it's been a while since we last spoke. I went down this path of researching anthropologists, tech, and a bunch of articles that you had shared. Thank you so much for that. It led me to a whole other world. This is probably ignorant of me, but I was very surprised to see anthropologists, cultural scientists, or social scientists who are getting employed in tech and engineering. It was among the top five employment opportunities.
You have mentioned this too, and I've been learning about how social scientists assist in identifying the gap between the customer's desire for a product and what companies assume that the customer wants. You've touched on this when you were talking about anthropologists or social scientists in tech. How can companies develop market strategies and product plans that cater to a diverse range of individuals while still achieving their business objectives?
We can take AI, for example. I can't forget that Microsoft bot was released and it became a neo-Nazi within a day or two. I might be missing facts or something because my brain has a hard time, remembering things. I do remember something like that happening. How do they accomplish this for a diverse range of individuals developing strategies and product plans that cater to every individual? I'm asking for a lot.
That's tough. Hopefully, the alignment rather than the gap between what customers want and what companies think that their customers want is the space of product-market fit to a large degree. That is life or death for a startup. You need to get that right. A lot of tech startups make the mistake of believing that all of their customers behave rationally, which is not the case at all.
As a developer, I do that. A bug will come in and I'm like, “This is not made for this user. We expect X from our user.”
We're all emotional people even when we are buying on behalf of our organizations. Customers are not going to be able to verbalize what they want now or what they might want in the future. You're not going to ask them that directly because you're not going to get a useful answer from them. One of the other things is a lot of tech founders base business decisions on their personal experience. They might be talking with a few design partners with early prospects at tech conferences and things. They get a vision of what the market wants. It's tough to steer away from that because this is misleading data. There's not enough volume to make these conclusions yet.
You need to hit that volume of statistically significant data, and then you want to consider a prospect's motivations as well, like why they might be saying one thing and doing another. People can be motivated like internal politics and what's going on with cross-functional teams. There might be some friction going on in their organization.
A good discovery process with a prospect asks these interpersonal questions about what's going on in the company rather than going straight for like, “What are your company's goals?” I hate that question. It is pointless to ask that question. Your customers are going to talk about what their customers want to hear, whether their software will exponentially increase productivity or their AI is driving some field of knowledge forward. That’s great, but in reality, your customers are probably dealing with mundane pain-in-the-ass problems like debugging, security, data labeling, AI model accuracy, and these types of things. Your language to them should be about ending those mundane, painful, and boring experiences. It's always about feelings.
This is a very product-marketing way of going about it, but you need to do your ideal customer profile. You need to do your persona work. I know it can feel silly, especially if you're a super technical leader, like a CTO, to make up a fake person and give them motivations, wants, needs, and all of this. Don't skip over your persona work. That is so important. That's a moving, living, and breathing document. Your customers are going to be influenced over time, so you need to continually revisit that and make sure that those assumptions still hold water.
Also, you need to cater to a diverse range of customers, but your messaging shouldn't be all things to everyone. That's another problem that companies will have. Oftentimes, they see websites where the copy on the site is talking to every different persona. It’s all over the place and very confusing. Your website should be speaking to the decision maker, which is the person who's going to book the demo or who you want to be on that call.
By all means, develop your community of users. Use your dev row and your docs. That's the place to speak on that one-to-one. Bring in a little bit more humor. Use their tone of voice. You can be a little bit more casual. That's the place to do that, but you have to be conscious of who is taking what action where. It's important to match your messaging to the persona.
Let’s say your messaging is good and it's right on target but you're sending them in emails, you're hurting yourself. I have this image in my mind where Elliot is leaving the little Reese's Pieces to get E.T. to follow him. It’s like that. The tech buyers are very cynical and smart. They can smell marketing and sales a mile away and they hate it.
You're going to be much more successful with these folks if you deliver value in your content. It doesn't have to be about your product. It could be anything that has a value that makes their day a little easier or that makes them better at their job. That's the Reese's Pieces. They're going to come back and continue to enjoy that content. Eventually, they're going to be ready to talk to somebody. That's how you build that rapport.
Product roadmap is another interesting area. Sometimes, when you're a startup, you have to make some difficult decisions about what to prioritize. It's important to own and retain customers in your core use case and your core vertical before you start building out additional capabilities. You always want to expand your target market. Startups are under pressure to do this. What can happen sometimes is you'll see them making this mad dash to become an end-to-end platform without solving some of the basic friction points in their UI or with their core capability.
Big companies do that too.
Expanding your product suite is only one way. You could expand your market through integrations like alliances. You can launch your existing product in a new market and then toggle your ICP and your positioning to match that. There are multiple ways of doing things.
Going back to that image of E.T., I think it's not Reese's Pieces for everyone. I love metaphors, so we're doing it. Not everyone wants Reese's Pieces. You have to figure out what they want. You need someone with a social scientist or anthropology background to help you figure out what that Reese's Pieces for each person is. It's not for me. There needs to be someone who is studying the person that you're catering to because sometimes, even they don't know what they want at that moment. That is true for people outside of the product too. That background of yours helps.
It is oftentimes the things that aren't verbalized for sure. Everybody has their own motivations and their own emotions around things. One of the principles of product marketing is the idea that people are either running away from pain or running toward pleasure. That is very true.
A product manager who is a friend of mine said the exact same thing to me once. She's like, “Are you running away from something or are you running towards this thing?” I was like, “I wish I could start making decisions like that.” It changed how I viewed what decision I was making. I'm thinking of times when you work on a feature. You're ready to deliver it and then the customer getting that particular feature is like, “Not really.”
What you are saying is it's not possible to completely avoid something like that. There are ways to mitigate that sort of thing from happening by involving people from the very beginning who can read between the lines, ask questions, or look for additional data to make sure that we're building around these issues that are bound to happen.
A lot of times, you can recover from that. It might be that you've put in a lot of time working on a particular feature and it turns out for the customer that’s like a box-ticking exercise that they have to do because they're getting pressure from their customers to do it. It’s not really what they are excited about. Sometimes, that happens too.
You have to be thinking, “What are the things that I want to shout from the rooftops?” Sometimes, you have to toggle that. It’s helpful to use some frameworks. A messaging house is helpful because then, you have a few different themes that you can pull from. If one isn't landing, you are prepared to move on to the next.
If something isn't landing, prepare to move on to the next.
I want to pivot a little bit into your journey here. We talked about your time in publishing. I know you published your own magazine. I would like to know if your previous involvement in the publishing industry has impacted your current endeavor. Where you are now in your work within the technology sector, what lessons or insights have you gained from your experience running your own magazine and then selling it to a publishing house? How have you applied them to your current pursuits?
I would not be able to do marketing and certainly not in tech if I had not gone through that experience of starting and selling my own magazine. I didn't take any marketing courses. I don't have that background. This is all self-taught. When I started my magazine, it was just me. I had to do everything. It was sales. I was convincing distributors to take copies. I was booking advertisers. I was doing layouts in InDesign and Photoshop, and teaching myself on YouTube.
I had to raise money to get the issues printed. I had to do stakeholder management because I had the writers and the poets wanting to know, “What's going on? You're representing me and my career.” I had to go to book fairs and host events. All of these things make you a very good full-stack marketer at the end of the day because you're developing all of these skills.
The stakeholder management piece is something that I am still using. In tech and in startups in particular, emotions are running high. People are very emotionally invested. You have to be conscious that there are egos and there is a lot riding on it personally for folks. I always try to influence by asking the right questions and proposing alternatives to different paths. It is a very gentle way of influencing.
I love that marketing is a gentle way of influencing.
It’s great. One of the other things is the production schedule. There were two issues a year. The issues had to come out on time because you've got distributors, advertisers, and writers. Everybody is depending on you. I am big on this idea of demand gen instead of lead gen. That involves turning your marketing organization into a media company to some degree. You have to churn out high-value content in a reliable cadence. It is helpful to have the structure of a production schedule.
Immediately, when I'd go to print with one issue of the magazine, I would turn around and start doing the content and the layouts for the next issue. It never stops. You have to be working on the next piece while you are still measuring the effectiveness of the one you just did. Probably the most rewarding piece about running my own company and growing it was when I started bringing on other editors. I hired an advertising salesperson. I had interns from a local college. I ended up managing a pretty decent-sized team of people and I was in my mid-twenties. It's young to be doing that.
That's amazing.
It's a lot of responsibility. I learned each individual has their own needs and their own way of communicating with you. You have to adapt yourself. You have to respect that if you want people to show up every day and be their best, especially when you have neurodiversity in the mix. Going to one of these massive noisy book fairs, you are going to experience sensory overload even if you're neurotypical. It's crazy. You have to be conscious as a people manager of things like the disability tax and the accessibility tax. These things are real burdens for folks, especially in the tech industry because I feel like we have more neurodiversity than other industries. As a people manager, it's your responsibility to know about these things.
You sound like an amazing manager.
Thank you.
Neurodiversity in tech exists, but people aren't even aware of their own neurodiversity. I got diagnosed when I was pretty much in my 30s. I have been in tech for over ten years at this point. I had no idea what I was working with. We hate to talk about emotions and feelings, which could be cultural in my case, but I very much saw it around me. I would see people get passionate about a feature or their code base.
If you find an issue in there or you are like, “This is how you can do better,” I'll get worked up. It’s like this is an attack on me, not my code. Speaking of all those emotions coming up, it is wonderful that you are cognizant of all of that and are able to cater to people's needs. It's amazing to have someone like you in tech. It gives me so much hope for our future.
It's so important to do. I know some people are going to be like, “That sounds like a lot of extra work.” That's why some folks are very afraid to disclose if they have a disability. That sucks because thought diversity, cultural diversity, different people and their experiences, and all of that makes you a better tech company. You are going to have people who find things that nobody else has thought of. If you are not supporting folks in that environment, these are very talented people. They're going to move on. You're not going to be able to keep them. You're not going to have the benefit of people finding things that others don't see.
Anthropologist In Tech: If you are not supporting folks in that environment, you will not benefit from people finding things that others don't see.
That's been a real shift for me personally. I see that trend in tech too, where people are not numbers or resources. The moment I start feeling a good number or resource, I have a conversation with someone that I know where I will be seen as a person. “I'm not just this code that I'm producing or this feature that I'm building. I'm much more than that.” All of it comes with good days and bad days, good code and bad code, and high productivity.
I'm glad that we're having this conversation and that people like you are coming in there and being like, “Yo.” People, you call them human resources. There's a human part of it that's very important. It is not just the resource part. I love that this background of yours or people like you are able to provide all of this space for people like me to feel comfortable, exist, and build things that are going to be appreciated or valued.
We talked about some of your experience with the publishing industry and the highs and lows a little bit. You touched on it. I would love to learn more about that. Also, what obstacles you had to overcome to come to tech? We can't leave tech in a dark light, so talk about some of the positives that you experience with tech. That would be great, too.
I am very glad to be in tech, and I'll tell you why that is. I would've been happy to stay in the publishing industry, but it wouldn't have me. I'd worked on literary journals. I was running my own successful magazine. I was like “I want to do more of this. I want to work my way up to commissioning editor in a big published account. I really want to do this.”
I went to tons of publishers looking for jobs and they completely rejected me. I didn't have an English degree. I didn't have a literature degree. They were like, “You have an anthropology degree. What is this garbage?” It was very clear to me after this experience of rejection after rejection. I was like, “If I want to keep going and publishing, I'm going to have to keep going running my own company.” I could have done that, but I wanted to be part of something much bigger than I could do myself, even with my team. I wanted to learn from founders who were further along and older and wiser than myself. I wanted that opportunity.
There was this publishing conglomerate that was viewing my magazine as a competitor. We had a frenemy thing going on. I let it be known that I was open to being acquired and they jumped at the opportunity. That bought me some runway to transition into tech. Through the process of building this magazine up from scratch and doing all of the jobs, I had this big set of marketing skills. That made me attractive to tech companies. This is a very anthropologist trick. I started hanging out outside of offices, overhearing conversations.
You were collecting data.
I was looking at what clothes are people wearing because if I get an interview, I want to dress like everybody else so I look like I work there already. I started absorbing all of this as much as I could. When I got in to start interviewing at these companies, they didn't care what degrees I had at all. All they cared about is what you can do.
I had this great story of starting my own company and then selling it off. I had all of the work and the actual evidence to show, so this whole portfolio. They were much more accepting. Some tech companies are actively seeking out people with anthropology in their background. It was much easier to get a foothold.
That's something I do appreciate about tech. I love that about tech where they will take you. You can find space for yourself if you are the resource that they're looking for.
It’s like, “What can you do? Show me what you can do. I don't care where you're coming from.” One of the most talented product managers I've ever worked with did an MFA in Poetry. People are multifaceted and multi-talented. If you embrace that, you're doing better as a company.
Embrace multifaceted and multi-talented people so your company will do better.
I completely agree. People do all kinds of bootcamps and things like that for a couple of months and start. They are good at figuring out code and writing it and doing stuff like that so they just get started. I want to jump into our rapid-fire stage. I am very glad. The more I talk to you, the more I'm confident in this rapid-fire session.
Usually, I ask you a question and you give a short answer or something. Given your background in cultural history and anthropology and how you collect data, I want to get your insight on the larger societal implications of some of these tech trends. I'm going to throw a trend at you and then you can give me your insight on where you see it going. AI will be part of it.
We are not going to get through a conversation and not talk about AI.
Not in this world. Let's start with diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. I know Brené Brown calls it DEIB, so Belonging is in there. Go.
I was the diversity and inclusion champion for Sage in Ireland, so I have some experience with this. It's very good when it's done well, but you have to be careful. I mentioned the disability tax earlier. You have folks who oftentimes will get pressured into representing their entire group because they're the only one or one of a few in the company. That's awkward. You're forcing extra work on people who may not want it but you feel pressured to participate in that. Belonging is important. You have to be careful that people are doing that out of enthusiasm and it doesn't feel like a pressurized type of thing. It shouldn't feel forced.
Anthropologist In Tech: Belonging is important. You have to be careful that people do that out of enthusiasm, and it doesn't feel forced.
I see that a lot with Black folks in tech. There is one person and they are supposed to represent and stand for anything and everything that Black folks stand for. If I am one on the team and I have been sometimes part of these conferences or we are having this late 9:00 PM session at the end of an offsite and it's just me left there, then I am representing all women everywhere.
You hit on that right where if it's done properly, then it works. If we're trying to make it part of the conversation or part of the company culture because that's the trend, then it hurts a lot. It feels like it is happening, but then you don't feel the impact or any change. The two things are not connecting. It adds confusion on top of everything.
I almost feel like if you're a smaller organization, I don't think you need a DEIB initiative or any kind of programming. It needs to be in the fabric of how you operate as a company. Some of that can be very uncomfortable for the folks who are in the majority because they have to own things that they do or say sometimes that are problematic or hurtful. It's important to incorporate that early on in a company because you want to allow people to have a voice. If you want those diverse voices to be enthusiastic and participate in these things, then you have to make them feel comfortable and safe to do so.
It's hard for us to do rapid-fire because I'm enjoying this conversation. The next trend is the whole emphasis on work-life balance. This includes the quiet quitting trend. There's an emphasis on work-life balance and flexible schedules. I know you have had a bunch of conversations around flexible schedules and how to have those conversations. I would love to get some insight.
With the quiet quitting thing, I feel like companies put that label on anybody who has other stuff going on, which is bizarre. The more you're doing outside of work, it's enriching your work life. It's allowing you to come back rested and enthusiastic. It's keeping you from feeling used and abused. For me, for the last several years, I've been working a four-day workweek. I have convinced companies to let me do that because I tell them what I'm doing in my “free time.”
The more you do outside of work, the more you enrich your work life, allowing you to return rested and enthusiastic.
On Fridays, I will advise other marketers. I am on the board of PhotoIreland, which is an incredible nonprofit organization around photography in Ireland, the whole visual culture, and supporting makers. I'll do that. I paint. I do landscape paintings and still life. I sell those too. All of these things make you a more well-rounded person. They bring in that diversity that we're talking about.
It's difficult to make the argument for flexible schedules if you're just saying, “I want work-life balance.” That's a completely legitimate thing to say. We're still in that place where you have to tell people all of the incredible stuff that you're doing with that day or with that flexibility so that they can see that it's a very productive time, it makes you a better advocate for their organization, and all of that stuff. That is the angle that is going to make you have that successful conversation. The return to office thing is awful.
You're bringing up trends, but let's talk about the return to office.
It's ridiculous. If you could have the most talented people from anywhere in the world, why are you going to close off the opportunity to have that?
I am so glad I work for a company where they were very clear about that like, “We're not going to do that.” I love it. My grandma will be like, “You're still at home? Are you working?” That's the thought process. My grandma was 78. If you, as the CEO of a company, are going, “You have to come back to be productive or to collaborate,” that's what you sound like. You sound like my 80-year-old grandma.
It's so true. I was working remotely way before the pandemic started with colleagues who were distributed all over the world in vastly different time zones. I have always felt super connected to the people on my teams. I don't know where that is coming from.
This is not haha funny, but it’s funny that we are companies that are building these software or these platforms to which we want people to be able to connect with each other like social media, Zoom, and all of these things, but then we're still the same companies going like, “We have this giant office. Someone needs to use it.” There is that company culture. I’m sorry. I can go on and on about the return to office and how it's ridiculous. Drum roll for the next one. Artificial intelligence and machine learning.
We knew we would get here eventually. I already said a little bit about how I feel about this. AI is incredible. AI is amazing. AI is going to transform the lives of everybody on the planet irrevocably. It's important that transformation is positive. When you see ethical AI teams being disbanded and the treatment of those folks who are raising concerns, and they are very educated experts and not randos, that concerns me a lot.
People in the humanities should be involved. They need to have a seat at the table when it comes to steering the development of this technology because it is so profound. We have developed a superpower. Anybody who watches superhero movies knows there's a great responsibility. We need to treat this like the superpower that it is and understand that superpowers can be good or evil. This is not just anthropologists and historians. We need philosophers, social workers, disability rights advocates, and artists. All of these people need to be involved in that conversation because it's too important. It's all of us.
Anthropologist In Tech: People in the humanities should be involved in steering the development of this technology because it is so profound.
All of that said, I am very closely watching what other folks and other marketing leaders are doing with AI. It's my responsibility to use all of the tools at my disposal for the benefit of the companies that I work with, which I will always do. If I see that there's a real use case and I see a lot of marketers incorporating AI into their day-to-day workflows, I'm going to incorporate those tools because I always want to be competitive. It's important for us to all be participating in the conversation around it.
There are a couple of things. I completely agree with you when you say that it's going to change how we work, how we function, and things like that, but I still feel like people are overreacting. I know people on Twitter who are like, “I wish I had started my career in AI and machine learning.” These are people who are well-established developers. They're feeling FOMO or something. It's like, “Calm down.”
We talk about how anything and everything we say is going to change the world. It is okay. It's another thing that we're doing. It's going to assist us. It's going to help us in different ways. Maybe that's naive of me or ignorant of me, but at the same time, we need to focus on the ethical part of AI before we hand it over to anybody and everybody. That's what's happening.
I forget the name, but the person at Google who was working on their team and developing came out and was like, “This is bad.” They were kicked out of the company and the entire team was disbanded. It's very concerning. I completely agree with you on that part. It is concerning to me that we are letting anybody and everybody use it. It’s training with all of that data and we're not focusing on the ethical part of it. That concerns me.
I'm not talking about hyperbolic situations where AI turns evil or something either. It can be something casually awful like the dataset that you've trained your algorithm on is inherently biased against a particular group. It can be something accidental. That's why it's so important to involve social sciences in that conversation. A lot of this is speculative at this point because the AI and machine learning that is in the hands of the public are not super powerful or super impressive, but it has opened up a lot of conversations. This is the time that we should be having those conversations before we get more powerful things in our hands.
Also, please verify all the data or any stats or numbers that you are getting from your AI bot. It is garbage sometimes. Fact check, please. The last one is the rise of social media. That's a simple one. I'm taking this time to have a conversation with someone with a degree in cultural history. How do you feel about social media?
That's another super problematic area for me. I manage social media for the companies that I work with. It can be a powerful and fantastic tool, but it's also one of those things that can be detrimental to individuals and their self-image, mental health, and everything. It's interesting to think about the effect that it's having on some of the social norms, like the social contract of how we behave in public and how we treat each other. You'll see this in urban settings. Everybody has got their face on their phones. Other people are an object. They're like an object in your path as opposed to another human being. We're disconnecting from each other in a very strange way.
Our attention span is also being consumed. These things consume attention. That's what they do. They eat attention. You have to be careful about what you give your attention to because that is your power. I always try to be cognizant of that. I don't personally use any social media except for my LinkedIn, but in the service of brands in a B2B space, it's still positive. It's a great way to interact with your customers in a more casual and authentic way. In that company space, it's positive.
You should be careful of what you give attention to because that is your power.
I love Jon Favreau of Crooked Media. He has a podcast called Offline where he has guests or experts, and these are the conversations he has with them. He is obsessed with Twitter. His normal usage is 4 to 6 hours daily. He's going through this six-week experiment of not using social media. I am very curious to see how that goes for him but also not curious enough to do it myself. I can keep talking to you. This has been wonderful. To wrap up, where can people find you?
On LinkedIn, I am In/JamesAnne. I love talking to other marketers and tech leaders, and I'm very open to new projects. Please feel welcome to get in touch.
I love that. This has been wonderful. I am so glad we did this. This gives me hope. I hope more people with your background join tech. We need you.
Hire more anthropologists.
Important Links
In/JamesAnne - LinkedIn
About Anne James
Anne James offers as-needed marketing strategy and execution to startup founders and small businesses that aren't ready to bring on a full-time marketing leader. With 14+ years of experience in both Growth and Product Marketing, she has specialized for the last five years in go-to-market strategy for zero to one products in B2B SaaS (cybersecurity, DevOps, AI/ML orchestration, customer data platforms).
website: annejames.io
