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EY’s chief digital officer says marketing is at an AI ‘inflection point’
Lou Cohen, EY’s chief digital officer, said many marketers are not yet taking advantage of the benefits of artificial intelligence.
Cohen, who is also a professor at New York University, Yeshiva University, and Baruch College, said marketing is at an “inflection point,” with investment shifting from general digital innovation to AI transformation.
Cohen said that marketers who understand how to use AI in an assistive way, by focusing on what outcomes it delivers best, will access a deeper level of audience segmenting, targeting, and testing. He was interviewed for CMO Insider at Business Insider’s studio in New York City.
Ultimately, Cohen said, the marketing function will embrace the new opportunity. “Marketers, they’re not afraid to try things,” Cohen said. “We’re going to learn more from the things that we fail with and that don’t work than the things that do.”
The following transcript has been edited for clarity.
We are at an interesting inflection point. In today’s marketing environment, you really need to understand how to make AI work for you; otherwise, you will end up working for it.
There are efficiency and operational gains to be had. But if you think about the outcomes that AI can enable from a marketing perspective, we could be smarter about how we segment our audiences for different campaigns. We could be more efficient in the ways our advertising runs. We could test more rapidly to get better-quality content in front of the right audiences at the right time in the right place.
But most marketing teams are not yet set up to take advantage of this potential. So the investments of the last 15 years in digital transformation are now shifting into AI transformation.
It’s a bit unknown now. Marketers are not totally comfortable with this because we’re so worried that it’s going to hallucinate or give us something that isn’t accurate. Marketers, they’re not afraid to try things. We’re going to learn more from the things that we fail with and that don’t work than from the things that do.
My colleague came up with a great way to evaluate the quality of our content using AI. We can paste in an article that a partner of ours wrote, and it will give us recommendations on how to make that piece of content better. But we’re never — I shouldn’t say never — we’re not likely to use content created by AI. But we certainly can use AI to enhance and give feedback to our content creators.
Hallucinations are real. The challenge is that as consumers of these technologies, we don’t yet understand the difference between probabilistic and deterministic outcomes. Probabilistic is the likely correct response that the AI is trying to give us. Deterministic is “one plus one equals two,” and arguably, one plus one always equals two.
When you’re doing a search on Google or Bing, for example, you are getting a deterministic response. You’re getting what it believes to be the likely to answer your question. Versus with the LLMs, the ChatGPTs, the Llamas, the Geminis of the world, you’re getting a probabilistic response. The model is bringing a bunch of different sources together to determine the answer it thinks you should get based on your prompt.
That means if we were using these tools for their designed purpose, we’d still need search engines to just navigate to the things we’re looking for, or to find the needles in the haystack of the internet. But LLMs give us a different opportunity. They can be assistants. That was some of the original idea behind these AI tools, to assist people in doing different tasks.
I think of these LLMs more as marketing assistants to give me real-time ideas, feedback, or suggestions, rather than doing the task for me. That’s a human putting AI to work to get better outcomes faster than if I were to just do it myself.
Harvey makes a big chief product officer hire as legal tech competition heats up
Harvey, the $8 billion legal software startup, is becoming a default vendor in Big Law. Now, with rival startups nipping at its heels and AI model providers moving closer to legal workflows, Harvey is bringing in a new executive to help defend its lead.
The company tells Business Insider it has hired Anique Drumright as its first chief product officer. In this role, she’ll shape what Harvey builds next and how quickly it can ship. Drumright has held roles at Uber, TripActions, Loom, and, most recently, HR software startup Rippling, where she led the company’s push into IT management software.
“Her slope of learning is very high,” said Winston Weinberg, Harvey’s chief executive. He described sending Drumright a lengthy Google Doc on the state of law firm technology and the day-to-day mechanics of legal work. She came back quickly with “really good product ideas,” he said.
The C-suite hire comes at a critical moment for Harvey — and for legal tech more broadly. Law firms are pouring money into new software meant to help lawyers work faster and save costs. Clients are driving much of that spend. After seeing chatbots and virtual assistants transform their own operations, they now expect the same efficiency from outside counsel.
Those tools don’t come cheap, and recent moves by the model providers themselves have complicated the picture. Anthropic’s release last week of a contract-review tool sent ripples through the industry and led to a major sell-off of legal-research stocks. It raised a pointed question: If a foundation model can review contracts, on top of handling tasks across the rest of the organization, how much specialized legal software will firms still pay for?
Harvey sits at the top of the heap for now. The startup has emerged as one of the best-known and best-funded players in legal tech, with licenses at over half of the 100 largest US law firms. The company said it ended last year with more than $190 million in annual recurring revenue. And job postings reviewed by Business Insider suggest it is pushing into mid-market and smaller firms, a long tail of potential growth beyond Big Law.
Earlier this week, Forbes reported that Harvey is raising a new round of funding that would value the company at $11 billion, citing unnamed people familiar with the deal. A Harvey spokesperson declined to comment on the report.
Harvey’s dominance comes with pressure. The company still needs to show lawyers its product can boost revenue, not just save hours. At the same time, competition is intensifying, from legal software startups like Legora and from OpenAI and Anthropic, the same companies whose technology powers Harvey’s platform.
Weinberg said Anthropic’s latest release doesn’t change Harvey’s product direction, but it does emphasize the need to move faster on shipping what makes the company distinctive. “Part of hiring Anique is to accelerate that,” he said.
If the next fight is adoption, Drumright has put in the reps. She’s spent years building products that ask people to change their habits.
At Uber, she worked in product and marketing as the ride-hailing giant scaled to billions of trips a year. Later, at Loom, she helped grow a product that nudged office workers away from meetings and long email chains, replacing them with screen-recorded video messages.
Drumright faces a similar challenge at Harvey, where the company has to convince reluctant lawyers, a famously luddite profession, to trade the familiar way of doing things for new tools. Those take time to use effectively.
“When something is new, even if it’s powerful, it’s still harder to do than the way you’ve always done it,” she said. Her job, she said, is to make those new capabilities feel intuitive.
Drumright is the daughter of two lawyers, and she has seen firsthand how low-tech legal work can be. She remembers her mother siting on the couch, preparing for a deposition by speaking into a tape recorder.
Drumright starts on Tuesday. Her first weeks at Harvey will be spent on a listening tour, meeting lawyers using the product and legal teams deciding whether to buy it. “Legal is a very specific domain,” she said, but the work starts with understanding how lawyers actually work today, and designing products that don’t slow them down.
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Critical Role’s chief creative officer, Matt Mercer, explains how he avoids burnout
Critical Role’s chief creative officer, Matthew Mercer, had been spearheading his eight-member crew’s relentless push into the big leagues of nerdworld for 10 years.
That was until this July, when he announced that he’d be giving up control of one of the crew’s biggest priorities, their long-running “Dungeons & Dragons” Twitch livestream.
In an August appearance on the podcast “Crispy’s Tavern: Tales and Tea,” Mercer said he’d felt the threat of burnout and thought he needed a break. He said he’d started to feel a “continuous need to produce creatively,” which was “a very draining and very scary thing.”
To be sure, Mercer and his seven cofounders still have a full slate of projects to work on. That includes an ongoing sold-out arena tour, as well as two Amazon-backed animated series on Prime Video. Mercer also has a key role in the team’s game publishing arm, Darrington Press, home to “Daggerheart,” their flagship game and their answer to “D&D.”
Still, Mercer says, it’s important to be able to admit when you’re done, and to give yourself permission to step away from the work for as long as you need to.
“My biggest advice for burnout is to acknowledge when you’re at the edge and take every opportunity you can to step away and replenish your cup,” Mercer told Business Insider.
Brennan Lee Mulligan of “Dimension 20” fame, Mercer’s longtime friend and collaborator, is the game master for Campaign Four, the team’s ongoing “D&D” stream. Mulligan taking over the main stream means Mercer is no longer solely in charge of captaining the team’s regular episodes, which often run to the four-hour mark.
“There’s this concept, the idea that just pushing through and sometimes necessity requires you to do that to a certain point,” Mercer said.
“But I find walking away and taking some time to enrich your creative input means that whatever time you lost beating your head against the wall will be more than made up for when you can return from a place of genuine inspiration and renewal,” Mercer added.
Campaign Four airs on Beacon, Critical Role’s in-house streaming platform, as well as on Twitch and YouTube.