Higher, faster, further: Really?

This evening is all about people, what makes them human and what they have over artificial intelligence. For Peter Martin, this human core consists of actively listening to others, "perceiving them with all our senses, grasping them cognitively, feeling them in our hearts", explains the CEO of creative agency Martin et Karczinsky. Then he takes a break, not wanting to overwhelm his audience. But the sentence is already written on the stage wall for all to see: "Align with the soul".

It's quiet in the Experience Center demonstration room at design lighting company Occhio in Munich. Martin's presentation at the invited event "The Human Side of Business" seems to have struck a chord. The visitors, including marketers, communicators and creatives, listen to his words with rapt attention. Some hold a half-full glass of wine in their hands. The soirée "The Human Side of Business - Growth in the Light of Attitude and Empathy" began with a networking drink and snacks. First the pleasure, then the work. This is no longer quite normal today, in an era in which the cost-benefit factor underlies everything.

The call for efficiency is getting louder

Generative AI has turned things upside down - not just for visitors to the Occhio event, but for everyone. Writing a speech? You don't have to do it yourself anymore, ChatGPT can do it much better, and in no time at all. Finding arguments for the pitch? Gemini certainly has more powerful ones. Realign your sales strategy? Why not ask Claude? It's always quicker, and the time you spend fighting for ever tighter budgets is ultimately valuable. The call for efficiency is getting louder and louder. And its metrics, the so-called KPIs, are spreading like a spider's web across all sectors. The aim is to achieve the greatest possible profit or benefit with the available resources such as capital, labor and time. But does this actually lead to the desired success?

"The speed of efficiency can do more harm than good in the long term."

The situation is tricky. Ever since the outbreak of the AI hype, the question on everyone's lips has been: who will manage to get the most out of the resources? While AI makes many tasks easier and faster on the one hand, it also brings with it more pressure to be even better than the global competition. The efficiency wheel is turning faster and faster. Many start-ups are currently entering the market with new solutions. One of these is AppliedAI, Europe's largest initiative for the application of AI. The joint venture between the Munich innovation center UnternehmerTUM and the Innovation Park Artificial Intelligence (IPAI) in Heilbronn aims to strengthen European innovative power and build global AI champions. Europe should not be left behind in the competition against the USA and China.

This is why the big conferences are paying homage to AI. During the Medientage München in October, speakers talked about how much AI is at people's side, as a friend, even as a lover. CEO Andreas Liebl described how AI agents work for companies in front of 5,000 visitors from the DACH region. "AI is dramatically accelerating productivity in various areas - from recruitment and finance to purchasing and sales," explained Liebl. Where many things are automated, the "extremely tedious tasks" in particular are eliminated, which does not always cost jobs, but sometimes does.

Artificial colleagues are faster

At the world's largest CRM provider Salesforce, for example, CEO Marc Benioff recently announced a hiring freeze on software developers, who were once in such high demand. AI can take over programming work that was previously carried out by developers. The company also laid off 4,000 employees, mainly in customer service, who were replaced by AI agents. Artificial colleagues are fast, humans are slow - and that costs market share. That's the efficiency 101.

By contrast, studies show that AI in customer service, for example in call centers, does provide efficiency benefits, but customers ultimately prefer to speak to people made of flesh and blood. For example, 51% of respondents in a recent Gfk study miss the personal support provided by AI applications. There are also data protection concerns. And so, despite fast processing by AI agents, only 24% explicitly want AI-supported service. In contrast, 48 percent prefer the classic service of a human assistant.

"Artificial intelligence optimizes the expected, not the unmistakable."

Matthias Horx also shakes his head when customer contacts are outsourced to bots. "Firstly, people don't want to talk to bots because they would like to have human contact; secondly, bots can't answer all questions. Thirdly, there are complaints and objections, as AI is always learning during its use, and learning is naturally also associated with misunderstandings," explains the futurologist with offices in Frankfurt and Vienna. There can therefore be no question of time or financial savings. "Employees who have helped callers so far may cost more than AI agents, but at the moment their job is to maintain the snagging AI interfaces."

The futurologist advises reconsidering how the economy works at its core - not in a linear economic sense, but systemically, he explains: "From a systemic point of view, efficiency is compression and acceleration. This has a heating effect: everything happens faster, i.e. more efficiently, not necessarily more effectively."

Efficiency versus effectiveness

For Horx, the crux of the matter is that efficiency does not equal effectiveness. According to him, effectiveness is created through sustainable interaction between employees via routines. The trend researcher describes the agreements between marketing and sales that have developed over time. "People meet for coffee in the canteen, for example, and exchange ideas there. This informal cooperation has organized itself and works," he says. "If you now take a department and make it highly efficient, there will be breaks in the overall organization. Routines fall apart, leading to inconsistencies and different perceptions. Companies then have to readjust. Leaps in efficiency may bring short-term growth, but they are disappointing in the long term," says Horx.

Horx uses nature, which moves at a certain speed, as a comparison. "If you accelerate a brain via an implant, it would suddenly work incredibly fast. The body would probably burn up because it would be constantly fidgeting. Even if the heart were to beat very fast or the liver were to become overproductive, there would no longer be any balance in the overall system. This speed also exists in the context of markets and people. Such connections are overlooked in the whole AI debate.

There are false targets

This imbalance can be seen in many areas - including advertising marketing. The trend towards programmatic ad targeting based on cookies and NetIDs has been leaving people out of the equation for years. Contrary to the promises made by ad tech providers and media agencies, it is often not possible to target the right person at the right time. The industry has been discussing this for years. One problem is that tracking technology is usually based on the IP address of a device, but not on real people. If, for example, several people in a family use the same computer or browser, this can easily lead to incorrect targeting. The technology may therefore be more efficient in that many forms of advertising are played out more quickly via complex user targeting, but because they do not reach people directly, they are not more effective.

"Whether intern or CEO - everyone wants to be seen and heard. Empathy is crucial, especially in leadership."

In addition, the timing is often not right either. Thomas Lohr, founder of the Berlin-based advertising platform Spoods, gives an example. "A woman searching online for vegan recipes is hardly interested in SUV advertising at the moment she reads an article about it in a food magazine," says Lohr. Even if she had researched a car beforehand, she would not be in the mood for it at that moment. In contrast, she would pay more attention to a Lidl advertisement with suitable recipe ideas at this time. The content environment must therefore be right. Lohr therefore also recommends contextual targeting for programmatic advertising purchases. A principle on which Google Ad Search is based and which generates around 75 percent of Google's total advertising revenue. Lohr's appeal: "Media must once again become points of contact for specific content. Advertising should serve the interests of users - not disturb them."

The situation is all the more urgent because publishers and companies are losing visibility in the AI era. Users who want to find out more about certain topics are increasingly being presented with their answers directly in Google AI Overviews or they search directly via ChatGPT & Co. where the original sources are also no longer visible but have already been processed in the answers. This means that the user receives relevant answers and, in the future, if such forms of advertising are permitted, also relevant advertising if contextual ads are placed in the chats. In this scenario, AI technology, of all things, which is causing a collapse in efficiency in other areas, puts people back at the center.

Creative performance remains central

Even at the prestigious "Effie" awards, where everything revolves around measuring, people and their very own creative achievements are not to be ignored. Even in times when creatives could sit back and relax. Kathrin Leder observes the trend towards a "tech-driven efficiency society" with skepticism. As project manager at the professional association Leading Swiss Agencies, she has been organizing the Marketing Effectiveness Award in Switzerland for over ten years, which recognizes ambitious marketing goals and their cost-benefit ratio. For Leder, however, good marketing is about more than just KPIs, she explains: "It is and remains essential to know your target group and choose the right messages and channels to reach them and persuade them to take the desired action. This judgment is not only based on the numbers, but also on the common sense and intuition for people, brands and markets of the Effie jury committees."

"Efficiency does not always mean that effectiveness is also achieved."

The Effie team is not yet aware of any AI cases that have produced award-winning creative achievements. Leder believes that technology-driven companies like Meta only need two pieces of information - the target and the bank details - to implement a campaign and that AI does the rest. She refers to an interview with Fabian Bertschinger, Executive Creative Director at Farner Switzerland in Zurich, which appeared in m&k in the summer. The creative criticizes the fact that in future, Meta will only need two things to implement a campaign: "Companies will only need to name their target and link their bank details. The AI will do the rest," the creative explains. For him, such a campaign without creation, targeting, strategies and without questions is above all one thing: "content without creativity." What sounds like efficiency is actually a rejection of the creative principle. "Because what results is neither surprising nor original. Generative AI optimizes for what is statistically expected, not for what is unique. It delivers what works, not what fascinates. This creates an aesthetic of flawless harmlessness, but also of insignificance," criticizes Bertschinger. However, good marketing needs profile and edges.

Clever inclusion of AI

However, there are also tech providers who clearly understand that humans and AI can only gradually become a team. "AI agents let people do what they do best - interact with people," says Patrick Heinen. As Vice President Solution Engineering at Salesforce Germany, he finds it highly inefficient when employees copy data from one system to another. To stop this happening, Salesforce has now launched the AI agent platform "Agentforce". The smart bots work autonomously by retrieving data, creating action plans and executing them within the company's guidelines without human intervention.

"The human core lies in active listening and the ability to perceive with all the senses."

"While people burn out from many repetitive tasks, AI helps people to focus on more exciting things again." To find these exciting areas of activity, Heinen advises first defining the goals and then considering whether humans or machines could be better deployed there. For a call center, this means that answering the same questions over and over again is not very creative for humans; an AI agent can also do this in natural language. If it reaches a dead end, it can hand over to a human.

"AI delivers what works statistically, but not what is unique or fascinating."

However, according to the Salesforce manager, the mistake that many companies are currently making lies in implementation. Sometimes there is a lack of communication and a lack of strategy. "Managers need to get their employees on board," he recommends. Andreas Liebl from AppliedAI also advises this. He admits that it will not be easy to shape this change. But it has to be, because it won't work without AI. The CEO has printed the following sentence on the bags and brochures: "Advancing Europe's industry to compete in the age of AI, shaping a future that we desire to live in." In other words: It's about helping to shape the future of AI - if not, others will do it.

On this evening in Munich, Peter Martin has taken a seat on the stage in a deep cream-colored armchair. The agency boss is talking to Susann Meise, who is responsible for employee management at the luxury lamp manufacturer. Why active listening brings real corporate success? "Whether intern, manager or executive - everyone wants one thing above all else: to be seen, heard and noticed. And that's exactly what empathy is needed for - especially in leadership," says Meise. When people are able to develop their personality and are given the opportunity to follow their own destiny, they lead a fulfilled life - that is efficiency par excellence. But such developments don't happen overnight, no matter how hard AI tries. Above all, they take time. The rediscovery of slowness - it has only just begun.