CEO Diaries: The Lessons I Wish I Knew at the Start of My Career…

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

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Steven Bartlett (0:33)

In today's moments episode, I'm sharing some of the most important lessons I've learned about B2B marketing. The lessons I wish I'd learned earlier in my career. A few weeks ago, I was in New York and sat down with LinkedIn's CMSO Jessica Jensen for LinkedIn Live. We spoke about everything from how to target and reach the right people to how to avoid wasting your marketing dollars, and our tactics for building real influence. This is the stuff every B2B marketer today needs to know. But instead of learning it the hard way, like I did, you can hear it all right now. Jessica Jensen, it's so wonderful to meet you, and you have one of the most interesting jobs and careers that I think I've ever encountered, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at LinkedIn. One of the most used terms in my circles at the moment of entrepreneurs has been as term AI, and there's a mixed reaction. There's a lot of people that see it as a threat and are kind of leaning out the ostrich with its head in the sand, and then there's a group of people that I have in my close circle that are excited and leaning in. What is your advice for entrepreneurs that are trying to contend with this new thing called AI?

SPEAKER_1 (1:35)

Yeah.

Jessica Jensen (1:36)

I think that AI will become the air we breathe and the water we drink just in the way the internet has. Can anyone imagine business or life today without the internet? I don't think so, and that has upsides and downsides. I think AI is the same. It will power so many things personally, professionally. I can't imagine starting a company now without leveraging AI in some way, either to save yourself incredible amounts of time or to create product prototypes.

Certainly if you're trying to raise money, not being versed in AI I think would be rather challenging today. I think all investors are viewing it as a must-have. It allows you so much more creative power and efficiency. You could be producing flip-flops or selling digital software. So I think anyone who thinks they can avoid it, I would encourage them to jump over the line.

How do you advise founders and start-ups that you talk to about how to use Gen.EI?

Steven Bartlett (2:55)

So I always think that the opportunity and threat are in the reaction. So, and I've seen this over my brief career, and there's been certain waves that have come into shore. Like social media was the first wave, then it was this thing called the blockchain, and now the third wave that I've observed is artificial intelligence. And in all three of those examples, the opportunity or threat was in your reaction.

If you lean out, then it is a threat, but if you lean in, it is an opportunity. And so for me, the most important thing, whenever I experience that dissonance that comes with something new, that I don't understand, that is technical, and it comes with words I don't understand, is to like lean in and mess around. So feel the dissonance, lean in. And for me, leaning in and messing around just means like, make sure that my LinkedIn algorithm understands that that's what I want to be served. So I start engaging with AI content. Give it a signal. Yeah, it's giving me more content in that regard. It means speaking to my team about it. And one thing we've done at the moment is we've set this AI agent challenge, which is for the next 60 days, every single team and every single department is implementing AI and AI agents to improve and automate their workflows. And we're all sharing it in this new channel. And at the end of the 60 days, there's going to be this big presentation where every team presents how they've implemented AI agents into the workflow. And there'll be this big prize that I'm handing out with a judging plan of AI experts coming into our company. But did you just click?

Jessica Jensen (4:22)

Yeah.

Steven Bartlett (4:22)

That's so cool.

I didn't see that. And I'd say, I think it all comes down to your relationship with change. And in the world we're heading in, you just got to have a really healthy, positive, optimistic relationship with change, I think.