AI & the new "Answer economy "

NECXT (00:06)
Hi everyone and welcome to a new episode of NeCXt. Today we’re diving into how to drive digital transformation in large organization, tackling challenges, aligning with strategic goals and rallying people around change. But we’ll also look ahead to the growing role of AI as an answer engine and what that means for brand content creation. Joining me today, it’s my pleasure to welcome Pete Blackshaw, a global leader in digital transformation.

AI and brand building. I had the pleasure of knowing Pete for years as we worked together at Nestle where we both shared a deep passion for driving digital change. Pete has an impressive track record from transforming global digital strategies at P&G, being global head of digital at Nestle to now leading his own AI driven startup BrandRank.AI. We’ll explore together his past, the evolution of digital and brand building,

and how leaders can stay ahead in a fast changing world. It’s going to be insightful and inspiring. So let’s jump in. Pete, welcome to NeCXt. And to start with, could you share a bit about your journey from your early career to founding BrandRank.AI and how did your experience in the

AI space shape the mission of BrandRank.AI? ⁓

Pete Blackshaw (01:26)
Yeah. Well, first off, thanks for inviting me and good to reconnect. I have so many fond memories of us working together at Nestle and it’s been fun on this startup journey. I don’t feel like I’ve really reconnected with a lot of old friends who are customers, partners, you know, and the like. My background is a bit of a mix between the big and the small.

you know, I’ve been a change agent in large enterprises like Procter and Gamble, where I created their first interactive marketing team. Nielsen, where I sold a company to when I sold my first startup to Nielsen and also at Nestle, where I got to know you kind of running digital and social media.

you know, innovation, did a lot of training at scale with young leaders. And so it’s a bit of a flywheel between, you know, the big companies and the small companies. And even when I was at Nestle, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how we could better partner with startups, ran the Silicon Valley outposts. So I’ve always believed that companies can move faster if they get more externally focused with the incredible innovation that’s out there.

I’ve always been a bit of a trust nut. So I’ve always been really obsessed with consumer trust. I do think that’s the currency of effective advertising and marketing. And we lose sight of it as we pursue our ROI objectives and targeted advertising. And I’ve always tried to keep that very central. So the first startup that I built after I left P &G was called Planet Feedback, which was one of the first trust infomedia areas. kind of empowered consumers to complain.

or give compliments to companies. And then we monetized the data and sold it back to companies. And that was pretty successful. We sold that to Nielsen. And then this latest startup has a lot of similarities where we’re almost like building a bit of a meter on top of answer engine results. My preferred term for LLMs is answer engines. I think if you look at it through a consumer lens, they are helping consumers to

NECXT (03:15)
you

Pete Blackshaw (03:38)
get solutions, get answers, their guides, if you will, their concierge. And so, yeah, and I just thought, you know, after I discovered Chat GPT and started doing some searches, I was pretty amazed at how, well, like everybody, I was pretty just amazed at the tool, but also just how uncomfortably honest they were about brands. So if you asked a question about

is Nestle sustainable? It might say something like, well, Nestle is trying, but it’s got a number of opportunities. And by the way, here’s their exact carbon footprint. And I just thought, my gosh, that’s really big. They’re really getting into these transparency dynamics. They’re connecting the dots. They’ve got institutional memory. Someone needs to meter that and create a currency in the marketplace and hence brand rank. And what we do is we measure what all the LLMs, the answer engines are saying.

about brands, good or bad. And we focus on three primary metrics, visibility. Do you show up? So if I say, who’s the best consultant in marketing in Switzerland? Will David show up first? Will you even be part of that mix? So that’s visibility. The other one is vulnerability. Vulnerability might say, should I trust David? And it might say, boy, he’s got

NECXT (04:46)
Not yet. But I’m working on it.

Pete Blackshaw (04:57)
bad background, it’s like, yeah, you know, he, you know, blah, blah, blah. And so, or it may have complete hallucinations about you. And then content readiness is the third metric, which is like, just how do you market to algorithms? And I think that is one of the most important. I used to say that a lot when I was at Nestle, but it’s more important than ever. Like how do you fundamentally market?

to a world of algorithms that are now becoming the agents of like how your brand is marketed. So yeah, that’s where I’m at. I’ve been at it for about a year. I’m having a blast. It’s kind of like startups are, you you pay yourself a third of what you were paid in your previous job and it’s very milestone driven.

but it’s been fun and I love the model and we’re growing fast and I’m just in the process of raising money from bigger investors. So,

Fingers crossed.

NECXT (05:49)
Fingercross, thank you very much for the very

and sharing

We’ll come back to

notion of answering engine

relation to content. But before that, you mentioned in your career that you also have that agency background. And not every digital leader has that. So having worked both in an agency

and corporate environment. What unique insights did you gain from your agency life that have shaped your approach to digital strategy in both large organization and today in your own startup?

Pete Blackshaw (06:25)
Yeah, well, I wouldn’t call it an agency, but it was a very service client focused enterprise. And we basically built a startup that provided services to major brands that measured what was being said about them on social media, but also gave them advice on how they can improve customer service and the like. So,

Yeah, we’re almost like a startup agency to brands. But I think what I learned is I mean, I learned a lot. I mean, just being agile, being flexible, you know, trying to do more with less. You know, big companies are kind of almost a crisis of riches because they have so much money and sometimes you’re maybe not as innovative. And with the startup, you just, you know, you need to kind of

make every dollar or Swiss franc scream. And you also just get really close to the customer because you’re not really sure what you’re selling. I mean what I’ve always learned, it’s big companies are very like, here’s the plan, here’s the strategy. But in a startup, that’s important. You got to be strategic, but you also have to be really pragmatic. And you do need to throw things on the wall. And you don’t even know who your customer is.

You don’t know your precise target is. And so you just have to go in there with a lot of humility and see whether you can build a business model against those areas where you get a lot of momentum. And I do think that’s a strong agency client service mindset. and that, and it’s hard to do that in large companies because everybody wants the plan and they want the 12 month plan. And now we’re in a world where in the world of AI, 12 months is like, you know,

10 rotations around the sun. mean, it’s just like a lot of, mean, the world moves very, very fast.

NECXT (08:16)
listening to you, agility, flexibility, humility are things and service orientation that you’re taking out of these days and that are also helping you and help you in your career. I’d like to come back

and how you brought that transformation and change within a huge company. During your time there, you led some major transformative initiatives in digital and social media, including the creation of one of the first Command centers.

an international network of digital acceleration team. So what were the biggest challenges you faced back then and what strategic principles did you rely on to drive this innovation?

Pete Blackshaw (08:54)
You know, when I was at Nestle,

a change agent and I entered the company at a very unique historic moment where I think the outsider was unusually strategic to the company. the important history is shortly before my arriving, Nestle had been brought to their knees by an activist group or NGO GreenPeace.

NECXT (09:20)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Pete Blackshaw (09:24)
related to palm oil supply chain, an issue that remains

committed to. And they not only raised a complicated product issue, but they kind of highlighted how clumsy the company was in this new media called social media. They didn’t really know how to speak the language. And so it was a bit of a meltdown. And I think

there’s that moment of truth where the big company throws their hands up and says, we don’t know what to do. And we don’t, we don’t, I am not even sure we trust people on the inside. We need someone on the outside. And so was there at the right time and I kind of came in and I was given a shocking level of license to just get things done without a lot of bureaucracy. And I was kind of surprised at how quickly when I said, let’s create a Silicon Valley outpost to really accelerate innovation.

NECXT (09:56)
You

Pete Blackshaw (10:17)
how quickly executive board said done. I was shocked at how quickly when I decided to create that international digital acceleration program, they said done. And a few other things that just moved faster. And so it’s weird. I think one of the important skills, even if you’re in a large company, is how do you leverage your outsider status? I think people in the inside trust the outsiders more. Sometimes it’s.

that comes in with the big plan. In other cases, it might be a leader. Now, it’s a difficult dance because no matter how much

NECXT (10:40)
Yeah.

Pete Blackshaw (10:49)
leadership runway you think you have. You still have to build coalitions. You still have to build

so you have to be an influencer. It’s not like you can wave a magic wand and say, the people in the center say you have to do this. They’ll just look at you and ignore you. you have to be really shrewd at like,

inspiring them. know inspiration sometimes is seen as kind of a squishy word, but it is really important when you’re trying to motivate people to follow. And if you can find opportunities to bring real economies of scale, and in my case, you know, everybody was dabbling in Facebook, but there really wasn’t a coordinated effort. And so it’s not that we centralized media spend, but we figured out a way of

ensuring that that incredible network called Nestle recirculated learning. And that was a real powerful. In fact, we use internal social media. First, it was Salesforce Chatter. Then it was, you know, Facebook Workplace to enable that dissemination. So, but that was like a really interesting experience. And I think in the world of AI, a lot of the new principles, I mean, for those listening to this that are trying to figure out how the hell do I influence the large organization?

NECXT (12:03)
Exactly.

Pete Blackshaw (12:03)
to move

fast because AI is really putting a massive premium on crazy levels of speed. It’s also introducing much more complicated issues. I mean the reality is that organizations just are not going to need as many people as they did in the past in the world of AI. So how do you lead with optimism?

when everyone’s paranoid. And that’s going to be really, really hard. mean, trust is going to be more important than ever.

NECXT (12:24)
Yeah.

Pete Blackshaw (12:30)
I see a lot of that. I see a lot of very strong leadership on the Nestle side. And in other companies really trying to build that trust with employees as they drive a very aggressive change agenda.

NECXT (12:41)
Thank you very much. I think this answer is very interesting also to many leaders listening to us. You mentioned trust, inspiration, having a vision, and convince people. As you know, one of the biggest hurdles for digital leaders nowadays is about convincing senior management to invest in transformation. So I think

many people some insights. Do you

any other insights or tips?

significant obstacles you faced in this area and how you successfully navigated to change actually and to drive adoption.

Pete Blackshaw (13:13)
think my most important tip is to learn how to manage not resolve tensions. And I wrote an article on Ad Age to that effect. I said leadership in the digital age is about managing not resolving tensions. And I think in large organizations, we have a tendency of really wanting a defined truth, or to resolve.

It’s A or B, it’s either this or that. And the reality is that in the world of digital and the world of AI, things are just more complicated. So take, for example, the tension between stimulation and integration. Should your digital strategy be standalone or should it be integrated into everything? And the answer is yes and yes. I mean it all depends on context. I mean I was a stimulant.

Like Nestle hired me as a stimulant who kind of came in from the outside and tried to really. Drive awareness around this opportunity. I’m not a very good manager. I’m not your classically trained Nestle or P&G Unilever manager. I’m not, you know, not very operational, but I’m a very good stimulant and so. The operational person figures out how to kind of push it across everybody, but you have to do it at the right time because.

AI is in a period of high stimulation. It’s like AI is challenging everything. Market research methods, R &D, go- to -market, speed to market, agency relationships. And so you kind of have to let that open up a little bit and then think about, OK, how do you kind of scale it? So that’s one tension. Stimulation versus an integration. Another one is scale versus agility. And big companies we obsess with.

NECXT (14:48)
Yeah.

Pete Blackshaw (15:02)
Sometimes we’re too early in saying, there’s a new capability. Let’s do a massive RFP and try to pick the best one when in fact the space is still unfolding into finding itself. And sometimes you do wanna get that learning from that non-scalable startup that just is right on the money, but they’re not kind of built for scale. So it’s a bit of a challenge. ROI versus intuition.

Sometimes companies just go to the extreme to figure out ROI when in fact you don’t need an ROI analysis to find the bathroom. And I think there’s just like a lot of areas where I think sometimes companies need to just get, and leaders need to just be much, much more intuitive. So guess that’s a long-winded way of saying, I just think there’s a lot of tensions that you may need to manage in the AI world, innovation versus regulation, right?

I mean, you can pretty much do anything with AI, but it definitely raises a lot of questions. Like regulation hasn’t even caught up with AI, certainly not in the US, maybe a little bit more in Europe. I’m not sure, but yeah, but leaders are going to have to manage this tension and it’s going to be really, really tricky, efficiency versus employment. It’s like that’s going to be hard, maybe harder in Europe where

There more protections in place, and yet AI is this unstoppable efficiency steroid.

NECXT (16:30)
So

dive a little bit more into AI. So we understand this is, I guess, in your opinion, the new must win battle. This is the biggest evolution over the past years. You spoke a lot about it as being used as an answering engine rather than traditional search engines. What implication does this shift have for how brands should approach their content strategy moving forward?

Pete Blackshaw (16:56)
Yeah, well, and when I talk about AI today, it’s mostly about generative AI. There’s a lot of AI that’s been around forever. Those of us that are into advanced media understand that AI has always been dishing out ads and the like. But on generative AI, that’s really been the game changer. And that is the world of these large language models, Chat GPT, DeepSeek, Perplexity.

Google Gemini, X-Grok, there’s probably a few in Europe I haven’t heard of, but yeah, they’ve really kind of taken over the market space. And what’s important to know is that we’re entering what I call an answer economy, where the most sticky activity on the web is becoming people like getting answers, getting answers, getting instructions, getting guidance, and all the world’s becoming a bit of an answer concierge.

NECXT (17:27)
Yeah, that’s right.

Pete Blackshaw (17:49)
And it has huge implications for brands on multiple fronts. Number one, the most important market space in the history of the web, search. It’s a $250 billion industry is being disrupted by AI search. And the numbers are profound. And we have a lot of clients who are in absolute panic. They cannot believe that they are losing their referrals through search. They are looking at their log files and they’re finding that

The answer bots are all over, eating up their content, and they’re just not sure what to do. In fact, I often say that in my pitches for our business that the $1 trillion brand marketing industry is being disrupted by AI search and brand marketers don’t know how to measure it, much less how to win and what to do with it and what to win.

Yeah, so I think you’ve got this entirely new world where AI is significantly changing consumer behavior. And if you really had to simplify it and take out all the buzzwords, a new purchase funnel is emerging where consumers that are looking for products are just going to chat GPT and say, what’s the best diaper? What’s the best coffee? What’s the most sustainable pet food?

and they’re getting not 10 blue links, they’re getting one blended, prompted moment of truth. Because that’s what the AI engines do. They blend it together. Who is David Smadja? And it might draw from 20 different sources. A bit of what you did on LinkedIn, a bit of what you did in your past at McDonald’s, at Nestle, and Nestle Swiss. It blends it together and says, this is a smart guy. You should work with him. No blemishes. All good.

And this is the way things are going to be bought. And for a lot of brands, this is really tricky because AI never forgets. AI knows what’s in your dirty closet. AI will bring that to the fore. It will consider it when you’re asking, like, what’s the best diaper and the like. And so this is where brands have to manage that world. The new world of brand management is managing what AI engines say about you.

The reach is mind boggling. Just put this in perspective. Five billion visits per month across all the answer engines. In the US, that’s Super Bowl level reach every week. Think about everything that goes into the Super Bowl ads. So massive consequences. so brands need to think about what positively

influences what these answer engines say about them, their competitor, their, you know, and, and they need to understand the sources. So what is it that builds my prompted moment of truth? One of the things that we’ve learned, for example, and everybody listening can take this to the bank. They don’t have to write Pete a check for consulting or even David, a check for consulting is that the number one algorithmic anchor feeding answer engines when you’re researching brands is a brand website.

Now, a lot of people are probably scratching their heads saying that doesn’t make sense. Websites don’t matter. Consumers don’t visit websites. I thought we just put our money on Facebook and Google, go to where the consumers are. But no, no, no, no. These bots go to your own media first to determine your level of truth. They’ll look at all of your scorecard information about sustainability, product performance, you name it. And then they’ll take a big chunk of that.

put that into your definition. So mission critical for brands. I often say, think less about the sex and sizzle and focus on your boring basics. Build a website that has the information that consumers need. Build a website that has FAQs. Build a website that has simple search. Build a website that doesn’t put your gold into PDFs, but makes them more fluid.

NECXT (21:47)
Yeah.

Pete Blackshaw (22:01)
and accessible. It’s not rocket science. It’s boring, but it’s critical if you really want to make sure that you show up in this world of answer engines. the good news, David, is that it’s a lot of the stuff that you and I were talking about 10 years ago about what brands need to do, but they didn’t have the incentive. how come brands don’t do a better job with customer service? Well, now they have to do a really good job because

It’s the only way they’re going to get credit with the answer engines. so to some extent, a lot of this is bringing brands back to basics at many levels.

NECXT (22:35)
Yeah, I like that conclusion. Back to basics, foundational work. I remember when I was at Nestle one day, when I think Snapchat, or whatsoever was top of mind for everyone. And someone came to me, hey, you’re no longer fancy,

you’re not on

with your brands. And my answer

I’m there where it’s needed. I’m focusing on the content, I’m developing the website, I want to be present where people

people look for me on search engines and I need to set up the foundation first and then we’ll go in progressively and expand the reach. you’re totally right. Foundation work is now more important than ever. And we have maybe as brands the right incentives to do that. So you founded BrandRank.AI to help brands navigate exactly this new era of the answer economy. Can you share

how the platform works and provide some real examples of how brands have benefited from using it.

Pete Blackshaw (23:30)
Yeah.

Yeah, so we’ve, yeah, I left my last job where I was running kind of a venture fund and a startup accelerator. You know, and again, it was like about a year after chat GPT came out and I just thought, you know, someone’s got to create a meter so. I part and, you know, sometimes there’s a lot of luck involved because I, one of my good friends was, had built some of the great

online platforms, he built TripAdvisor and then a company called PayCore, kind of an HR SaaS platform. And he was kind of getting bored looking for something to do. And I told him about my idea and we’re like, okay, why don’t we build a SaaS platform that, you know, can just serve as a meter on top of all these different answer engines and kind of get in front of the market. And, and then we also challenged ourselves to, and we thought, you know, Hey, I’m really into branding. we’ll call it brand rank.

the tagline was prompting your brand truth. it’s kind of exactly like, you know, it’s like, you you know, so, you know, and I think everybody kind of intuitively got it like, yeah, I think I need to know what AI is saying. And then one of the things that was really unique and it was a good comparison for when I was at Nestle was we use AI for everything. So if you’re a small entrepreneur and

NECXT (24:35)
Yeah.

Pete Blackshaw (24:52)
You can do so much more with so little. It’s much more controversial at the big company level where it’s almost like AI can do everything. What are we going do with all these employees? But if you’re a startup and you don’t have a lot of money, it’s like everything. So my first startup that I launched 20 years ago, I raised $31 million in the US. And that was within the first six months.

And people are just raising obscene amount of monies and everything costs a lot of money to do just to host a website would cost you a million dollars a year. Today, in the AI world, like you can just, you know, I raised 1.2 million and we still have a lot of cash in the bank and we’re bringing in real revenue. So it’s kind of a different world where, and what I did is I brought in some really smart angel investors who generally were hands off with the founders of like, we know you Pete, we know your track record.

Here’s our money. Use us if helpful, but just run. know, Cheryl Sandberg’s my biggest investor who I’ve known all the way since business school. Worked with her a lot when I was with Nestle, you know, helping her build that ad model. John Pepper, who’s the former CEO of P &G, one of my personal idols, one of my leadership icons that I think about all the time. yeah, and we basically, we started, you know, just

doing some basic audits with brands. Sometimes we do it for free just to get their attention, get them to lean in. And then they’d say, well, let’s we want to dig a little deeper. Can you compare us to competitors? So we do a pilot. And then we’d ultimately, when we got our platform out, we’d sell them subscription because the model that we’re building is based on selling subscription. Obviously, you need scalable software to be taken seriously as a tech company as opposed to a service company.

NECXT (26:18)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah.

Pete Blackshaw (26:41)
And some of the projects we did were really interesting. We did some work with Nestle. I mean, I’m still very close to Nestle. And I love the fact that they challenged us on sustainability. What are brands saying about sustainability? I do think there’s real conviction and desire to kind of get that right. And I don’t think there’s any, know, there’s very kind of, you know, sincere efforts. So we did some work with Nestle Canada in that area. I spoke on Earth Day.

And then that led to some additional work. Then we brought in some projects from companies like P&G. without naming names, we brought in a lot of players that are just very curious. And some of it was a little bit like, want to audit, but along the way, we want you to teach us about AI, like I’m doing on this podcast. And I do get a lot of requests for that. And it’s good for business because I get that. It’s almost like a one-two punch. But yeah, we’re metering the marketplace.

And it’s been really, really interesting. couldn’t imagine. I hope to God it’s successful, but I couldn’t imagine a business model that is just more interesting. And all the AI engines think differently. They have different priorities. They’re the world’s greatest BS detectors. And I kind of like that

I like to start from vulnerability. So they do really, you know, like, like certain types of social media monitoring, they do kind of start from those exposure areas. So yeah, we’ve been running the market. I think we’re up there about 45 brands. We’ve done work in CPG, Banking, B2B, Health, a really nice mix. And now it’s like, yeah, I know this is a big idea.

NECXT (27:52)
Yeah.

Pete Blackshaw (28:14)
Now I’m like, OK, we got to raise money to scale because this is becoming real. We’ve already had a lot of strategics reach out to us who I won’t name by name, they’re very, yeah, they know that we’re onto something. And so they kind of want to almost like take the ride with us. And then we want to benefit from them as well. But yeah, it’s been fun.

NECXT (28:32)
It sounds like an incredible journey and that’s just starting actually with huge potential and that makes a lot of sense. I’d like to come back to something that we shared years ago. I remember a lunch we had a while back and you asked me back then what kept me up at night regarding digital transformation. And I remember we both shared the same fear which was waking up one day and realizing we’d been left behind. And I know this is a sentiment

that many digital leaders and CMOs can relate to.

personally often tell them that curiosity, passion is amongst other what keep me personally ahead of the curve. But I’d love to hear from you. How do you stay alert and aware of the constant digital evolution and what advice would you give our listeners on how to cope with this never ending change?

Pete Blackshaw (29:09)
dude.

Yeah, listen, I mean, I think you nailed it. I mean, curiosity is really important. And you know, it’s a complicated word to like, you know, to be a good manager, you don’t want your employees to be too curious. They might go sideways, they might be divergent, they might go off plan. And every once in here’s somebody in an AI forum saying, but where’s the strategy? It’s like, I’m like,

NECXT (29:46)
Exactly.

Pete Blackshaw (29:47)
you’ll find the strategy if you just start to explore and you don’t have to start with like the end point, but just AI is like the greatest gift to efficiency and exploring. And so I think, you know, the most important thing is for all of us, even in our personal lives, to just understand what the capability is bringing to the table.

You know, like I’m a pretty divergent thinker, as you can tell. And AI has been a great offset for me. It’s like helping to organize my thinking. I almost have like quadrupled the superpower because I can not only come up with ideas, but I can turn an idea into a Cogit business model. Thanks to AI, without any expense, I can add concepts to it. I can do validation research. I can create personas that can interrogate the idea. you know, but it all started with curiosity.

Is Nestle sustainable? Is Pampers trustworthy? And so people should just fire off a million prompts and just on anything and they will immediately see where they can add value in a business context. Now, when I was at Nestle, I gave a TED talk at University of St. Gallen and it was called the work-life advantage. And my argument was that

The folks that do really well in digital, they’re ones that kind of experiment with digital in their personal lives. And then they immediately connect the dots. Now, never has that been more true than with AI and really using these tools and everything. in my personal life, I am producing, I’ve written like a thousand songs that I give to all my relatives for their birthday. They’re AI generated songs that sound better than top 10 hits.

And that gives me a lot of power when I go to work and sort of say, yes, we can do this marketing plan for a fraction. I’m creating videos. I’ve created a bot of Pete, you know, just out of my fun time. But now if you go to my dashboard for a company, you will see a bot of Pete. And if you push a button, he’ll speak to you in French. He’ll speak to you in Italian. He’ll speak to you. And I learned that in my personal life through my curiosity. gosh.

NECXT (31:52)
Thank you.

Pete Blackshaw (31:57)
it’s actually really easy to create an avatar that can create a better face to the consumer. So yeah, I think my big thing is that managers need to like empower their employees to test things. Don’t let them go too sideways, but they need to create that room for exploration because everything in AI drives efficiency. It’s not like they’re messing with NFTs and crypto that may not.

ultimately add value. These are all ways of doing things better, faster, cheaper. So it’s all upside. And you don’t want to have a world where the corporation is so sanitized and everybody’s doing on the outside. You got to figure out a balancing act.

NECXT (32:35)
No, that’s so true. And I think in digital more than any other industry,

the best way to learn, I would say, is to put your hands in the dust and try and test and get used to it. Pete,

getting to the end of this conversation.

there’s one key insight you could leave our listeners with about the future of digital, what would it be? Something around AI, Testing, being curious, you you have the word.

Pete Blackshaw (33:03)
AI never forgets. And so if you’re a brand builder, there’s a real accountability principle here when someone can go to AI and just say, can I trust Pete Blackshaw? Should I hire him as a consultant? Should I invest in his company? And just know your vulnerabilities, learn how to manage it.

assume you’re just, you’re going to, you’re a big bullshitter, you’re just not going to get away with it. You you’ve got to be, you know, to some extent, like AI is going to move everybody closer to the truth. And that may not always advantage brands. It may, it may advantage your competitor and your personal brands at impact as well. do a lot of work monitoring personal brands. And, and so, you know, be mindful of that because the way

Choices are made. You know a lot of agents are going to go around looking for the best people. Someone’s going to say but I don’t want anybody who’s got any like anything negative and they’re just going to find that and so just. You know, brand management is going to get a lot more complicated, but remember there’s a real accountability principle that’s emerging and you know know your truth and if you know your truth, you’re probably going to be better and better to market yourself or the brand that you represent.

And I would say, and I would just also just say, stay curious. I mean, we’re still like in the second inning or whatever the European metaphor is, like the first half of the of the football game. And there’s a lot more. Innovation coming around the corner, and so eyes wide open, stay curious and have a lot of fun. Sometimes the fun stuff is what makes us better managers.

NECXT (34:48)
Great. I think

that’s a great

end this conversation and that’s a wrap for this episode of NeCXt. I hope you found today’s conversation as insightful and inspiring as I did from the realities of driving digital transformation in complex organization to the exciting and sometimes as well challenging future shaped by AI. There’s a lot to take away today. So thank you very much, Pete, for sharing your journey, expertise and forward thinking perspectives.

It’s always a pleasure to learn from someone who is truly shaping the future of digital, brand building and innovation. And if you’re a digital leader or a CMO wondering how to keep up with change, I hope this conversation gave you some fresh perspective and inspiration. So thanks again, Pete, for being part of this episode. Thank you to all

listening for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, share.

Leave a review and stay tuned for more conversation. Until next time, stay curious, stay ahead and see you soon on NeCXt to hear what’s next in tech and leadership. Bye bye.