Episode 220: Why judgment is your strategic advantage in the age of AI, with Marketbridge and Turtl

One of the things that came out of the podcast, which really resonated with me, was this concept that we're moving from a knowledge economy to a judgment economy.

And I think there's so much in that.

Nick, just tell us a bit about how that came about and your thinking on that.

Yeah, so first of all, I can't claim that it's my original thought, just to be really clear.

So it's the distinction that's made between intelligence tasks and judgment tasks.

And obviously that's super relevant as we look forward to the uncertain future of AI and what it's going to do.

But I think that what people are realizing is that there's two types of jobs that we as human beings do.

There's intelligence tasks, which are the types of things that you can train, say, a very intelligent graduate to do quite reliably.

And then there's judgment tasks, which are things that require a degree of sort of gut, instinct, taste, all those sorts of words, uniquely human capabilities, let's say, that have to sit on top of intelligence tasks in order to make sure that we move in the right direction.

So to take an example, the one that I think makes the most sense to me, let's say that you're doing NDAs in a legal department.

Well, if you are just preparing the NDAs, picking which template to use, filling them in correctly, checking it was done properly, that's an intelligence task.

But managing the overall risk profile of that NDA program, that's a judgment task.

And that requires that human instinct and gut feel as well as intelligence.

And so the separation between those two types of tasks, I think, is a really interesting thing to think about.

So bringing it back to marketing, because I think it's highly relevant to the profession that we're in, does judgment become competitive advantage?

I think absolutely.

I think that, you know, in a world where anyone can execute any intelligence task, I'm thinking into the future here, at any kind of scale, at any time of speed, which I think ultimately is what AI is going to promise, where is left to compete? You know, when that becomes table stakes, the only thing that you can really compete on is, you know, what do you know that no one else knows? What do you think that no one else thinks? What makes you unique and interesting and worth talking to and thinking about as opposed to everyone else in your category?

Sure.

Fee? Judgment?

Yeah, I mean, I think on a macro level, this is where it really comes back to kind of strong leadership and how that cascades into your brand vision, the mission, the purpose of the organization to allow people to make strong judgments day to day.

You have to have a really clear infrastructure operating model.

that gives people that clarity.

I think on a micro level, if I take one example with AI, if we look at the creative and the AI tools that our teams have been testing and using for the last couple of years, it really is the people that are able to use the right judgments along that journey as they're using those tools that are getting the best output.

So I think we can see that living day to day, but it's a very big theme that I'm sure we'll be digging into more over the coming year.

So we're going to have 700 marketers in the room at Ignite on the 1st of July.