Plugging In

There are, I think, few things more British than watching England do quite well at a major tournament and feeling the juxtaposition of both wanting to sing that “football is definitely coming home this time”, whilst simultaneously wondering how they are going to ruin it, a controversial red card anyone?

I did the very special thing of pinning my eyeballs open until 2am for the kick-off, only to almost immediately fall asleep for most of the game. An excellent lose-lose.

Of course, I could not get past this bit without mentioning the ludicrous injustice, and subsequent schadenfreude, of Donald Trump jumping on the blower to his mate who runs FIFA to get the USA star striker’s red card overturned for the Belgium game (petition here).

Unfortunately, as Trump has probably never been the underdog, he failed to realise that his actions gave the opposition all the fuel they needed to get right up for the game and thump them 4-1. 

Victory in more than one way, and a lesson in there too: the underdog must move quietly and unassumingly, which is probably not Trump’s natural leadership strategy.

From one money-making machine with a long history of controversial people at the top of it to another, it was also Silverstone last weekend.

They welcomed more than half a million people through the gates across the weekend, a new record for any Grand Prix anywhere, and the equivalent of a medium-sized city turning up to watch a group of extremely expensive cars go round Northamptonshire very quickly and noisily.

And within me lives the tension that, despite all the obvious conflicts, I still love these sports. F1 is particularly good when the rules change and multiple cars can win any race.

And business, in its own slightly less glamorous and more spreadsheet-based way, is the same. It gets interesting when the rules shift. When the tools change, and when the advantage moves from one place to another.

The times they are a-changin’

So, there is an Audi advert around at the moment for a new hybrid model, and the audio grabbed me.

“When Bob Dylan plugged in his first electric guitar, he didn’t just add electricity. He added power to his legacy.”

I appreciate that getting life advice from a car advert is not necessarily where any of us hope to end up. But it is a very good line.

Because Dylan could have seen the electric guitar as a threat. He was already Bob Dylan. He had the songs, the voice, the acoustic guitar, the whole thing. He could have stayed exactly where he was and still been one of the most important musicians of his generation.

But he plugged in.

And people hated it.

People always hate it when something familiar changes. Most of us like change in theory, usually when it is happening to somebody else, at a safe distance, and preferably not affecting the thing we already understand.

If I can ask you to summon an image of Status Quo now. No, not the band. There is a bit of psychology to back this up called status quo bias, which is basically the human tendency to prefer things as they are, even when something new might be better.

AI is a very easy thing to talk about bravely in meetings, articles and LinkedIn posts. It is slightly different when you find yourself looking at a tool and thinking, “Hang on, that is a bit of my job, and I quite like my job.”

I went into Churston Ferrers Grammar School recently to impersonate Peter Jones as best I could for a Dragon’s Den event, and it blew my mind on multiple levels.

The Year 10 students had been working on imaginary businesses as part of their business studies course. They had five weeks to develop the idea, build a plan, think about the market, work out the numbers and present it to a room full of local business people who were all trying to look encouraging rather than knackered.

And honestly, they were brilliant.

Not “good for 15-year-olds” brilliant. Just brilliant, brilliant.

They had thought about routes to market. They had thought about audience. Some had looked at affiliate schemes, physical placements, digital channels, pricing, branding and customer experience in more detail than plenty of actual businesses manage after five years of trading and three rebrands.

But the bit that really stayed with me was that several of them had also built mobile and desktop applications using AI tools.

Not as a “look, we made the robot do a thing” moment. Just because that was an obvious part of how they could bring their business concept to life.

That is the bit that should make every current business owner’s ears prick up a little.

These students have not grown up thinking that building an app is something you might get to in the future by hiding in a dark room with a specialist developer, eating pizzas and spending a budget that makes your accountant start breathing into a paper bag.

They saw a problem, a tool, and used it.

One group created a sustainable sun cream brand rooted in Torbay. Their thinking was that local beaches and marine life matter, and that existing sun creams can have a harmful impact on the ocean. So they built a product around that local problem, created a lovely brand, designed packaging, thought about who would buy it, and had a proper route to market.

It was thoughtful, commercial, rooted in place, and solving a real problem with values and passion on display in these 15-year-old girls’ hearts.

They already understand the point: marketing is no longer just what you say about your business, in the same way that 1950s blunt advertising would not cut it for millennials. They already get the importance of understanding how easy your business is to understand, use, buy from and come back to.

It is the content someone reads before they trust you. It is the checkout process. It is the follow-up email. It is the booking system. It is the dashboard, the automation, the reminder, the useful tool, the simple explanation, the bit that saves someone from having to ring you and ask a question they should have been able to answer online.

AI does not change that principle. It just gives us more ways to make those things better.

That does not mean chucking AI at everything and hoping it turns into innovation. That is not a strategy. That is a toddler with a hosepipe.

But it does mean looking honestly at the business and asking:

• Where are we doing slow manual work that does not need to be slow?
• Where are customers getting stuck?
• Where are we sitting on useful data but not actually learning anything from it?
• Where could a simple tool improve the experience?
• Where are we protecting the way we have always done something, rather than protecting the value we actually give?

At Vu, we have been asking ourselves the same questions. One of the things we can now share is a new reporting dashboard for our clients.

The first tier pulls together data from places like analytics, Search Console, SEO tools, website performance, carbon measurements, WooCommerce and WordPress. Instead of us manually pulling everything into a report once a month, clients can see the information in one place.

The next bit is where it gets interesting. AI then reviews the different sources of information and looks for useful actions, changes, wins and things worth paying attention to.

Which is exciting. And, if I am honest, it is challenging.

Because that has basically been part of my role.

There is a weird moment when you build something to save yourself time and then realise you have built something that cuts you out of what you thought made you useful.

But I also believe that is the wrong way to look at it. Better to play and explore and find yourself at a crossroads:

1. If the tool is rubbish, fine. I still have a job.
2. If the tool is good, also fine. I now have more time to do the work around it that actually needs judgment, experience and a bit of human messiness.

The conversations. The strategy. The awkward questions. The bit where someone says “we want more leads” and you have to gently point out that their offer is confusing, their page takes too long to load and the contact form feels like applying for a mortgage.

AI can help with a lot, but it is shaped by your knowledge and questions, or the gaps within them.

It cannot yet sit in a room, read the weird energy between three stakeholders, understand that the thing nobody is saying is probably the thing that matters, and then make a joke about it to lower the tension.

Dylan did not stop being Dylan because he plugged in an electric guitar. He became a different version of Dylan. Louder, stranger, more divisive and more powerful.

A small reminder, perhaps, that change is not always neat. Sometimes it arrives as a global technology shift. Sometimes it arrives as a classroom full of Year 10s casually building apps. Sometimes it arrives as a hybrid Audi advert quoting Bob Dylan at you when you were only trying to watch the football at 2am.

So, yes, the tools are changing. The rules are changing. The next generation are already using things many businesses are still nervously avoiding.

Uncomfortable, but that does not mean it has to be a threat.

The question is whether you are going to stand in the crowd booing it, or pick it up and see what it can add to what you already know.