Daniel Hulme is a leading expert in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and emerging technologies. He is the Global Chief AI Officer for WPP, the world’s largest communications group. He is also the founder and CEO of Satalia, which provides AI products and solutions for global companies and was acquired by WPP two years ago.
We caught up with him on his recent visit to India and spoke to him about his role as the Chief AI Officer for WPP, how is AI transforming advertising, what will be its impact on the 2024 Indian General Elections and US elections, what are the common mistakes marketers are making in AI application and much more.
Edited excerpts
How do you see the role of Global Chief AI Officer evolving in the future as AI continues to sizeable impact on various sectors? And specifically how do you see it evolving in your business?
There are multiple type of technologies that people refer to as AI. First thing for Chief AI officer is to understand these technologies and how are they best applied to solving problems and frictions that exist across organisations and essentially enabling it to be more efficient and more effective. That is the challenge to get your head around this complex world of algorithms.
You have to also ensure deploying these technologies is safe, secure and governable and also consider many of the ethical consequences and effect of these technologies. And as I said, we have to think about the macro-impact that these technologies have, mitigating all the risks associated with them. One of the things that I do as well is inform and educate governments around helping them navigate these technologies in a way that is safe and also inhibiting organisations to be able to innovate.
Do you deal with clients on day-today basis as well?
My role is to ensure that the leadership of these organizations are sober in terms about how they approach using these technologies. There is a history of getting excited about new technologies like generative AI and essentially wrongly investing in applying those to your business. So I help boards strategise to ensure that they are using these technologies to add value to their business. Also, most organisations realise that they need to adapt quickly to a changing world. In fact adaptation is one of the cool definitions of being intelligent. And my role as Chief AI officer at WPP is to ensure that they are architecting themselves completely to the processes and also adapting themselves to the changing world.
Many of the ad holding companies have the roles of CTOs, so with CTO as a designation do you think a CTO’s responsibility is expanding beyond technology management with explosion of AI?
Our CTO Stephan Pretorius is tremendously knowledgeable about AI. We discuss AI constantly. But I think we need to acknowledge that these technologies are going to have the most profound impact on businesses and society. And WPP had the foresight to see that there is a role as a Chief AI Officer ensuring that I am working with Stephan and the CTO team to making sure that we are navigating this complex world effectively. WPP have been thinking about AI for many years infact we had our first VP of creative AI back in 2019. We also appointed our global head of data and AI in 2020. And then I was brought on as Chief AI officer in 2021 as a part of the acquisition of Satalia.
As organizations increasingly embrace AI, is it plausible to think about Chief AI officer ascending to the role of CEO?
I am not too sure whether I want Mark Read’s Job, he does a phenomenal job at navigating this complex world beyond AI. Mark has been thinking about AI for many years. We have had many conversations on AI and how is it going to impact the industry. But as a CEO and I am still the CEO of Satalia, I have to still deal with people and clients, technological impacts and adapting ourselves for its applications.
But actually as I have learnt more about the world of marketing, there is role to actually think about how technology is applied across the entire supply chain. People might have heard about the concept of digital twin which is actually a simulation of the entire organisation and I actually think it is the CMO who will drive that thinking across the organisation and hence is the right candidate to ascend to the role of a CEO.
..and it is already happening.
Absolutely.
Speaking of Satalia, how have the past two years being a part of WPP been for the company?
It has been amazing. We were acquired for a number of reasons. We have the capability of applying AI across the supply chain, our ecommerce and commerce offerings, real pedigree in understanding how to understand workforces and apply those workforces in smart ways across WPP. Using AI to operate more effectively to deliver creativity to our clients. And we also bring AI to our clients in conjunction with our core offerings. It has been a phenomenal two years, again WPP had the foresight that AI is going to explode over the next decade.
On that note, WPP partnered with Nvidia at Computex to harness AI to enable creative teams to produce high-quality commercial content more efficiently. If you ca break this down for us and tell us what will this partnership mean and what will it do for WPP and various teams within the organisation?
One there is an ideation phase which has a lot of parts and processes, there is a content production phase and then there is dissemination and activation phase of putting across channels to ensure that you are getting the return on the investment. We are making sure that we see AI optimising last part of that process. Optimising pushing that content across channels, larning about what content is working, adapting that content very quickly.
There is still bottleneck in the production of great content which is where our relationship with Nvidia that will accelerate the speed of our ability to create content at the production phase extremely quickly. And then what AI and generative AI is going to unlock and enhance is our ability to create new ideas and to come up with campaigns that never have been thought of as a part of the early start of the process.
With so much talk on applications of AI and Generative AI how as a CAIO do you differentiate wheat from chaff?
I fortunately go with over 25 years of experience in academic AI, 15 years of experience of applying AI. I think we need to watch out for new shiny technologies that people get excited about. We know that generative AI is extremely good at knowing things about the world, also telling you about the world through images and through texts. It is not good at reasoning, it is not good at prediction, at decision making.
So we need to make sure that we understand what are the problems that we need to solve and how do we apply the right technologies in solving those problems. I built an entire career in defining AI and over the past two years actually we have been looking at AI not through the lens of definition of technologies but through the lens of application.
With 2024 Indian General Elections and US Presidential elections coming up how do you think AI will be applied around these two mass exercises especially around communication and campaigning?
We know that these technologies historically have challenged our political foundations and the concern is that they may continue to challenge our political foundations which is why I think this industry will play a critical role in ensuring that any content that we are pushing out there is authenticated, we can demonstrate the provenance. And we are working with the governments to help them understand the impact that these technologies will have and how we can mitigate the impact.
This something I am incredibly passionate about. Blockchain is playing an important role in ensuring that content is authenticated. We can also use AI to detect content and see how minority groups or political parties or cultures might feel about that content. We can use something like a ‘council of responsible AI’ to help understand how content is perceived by a much wider set of audience, ensuring that we ae creating content that is not offending people.
What are the biggest mistakes you see companies when approaching using AI?
The biggest mistake is applying the wrong technologies to solving the wrong problem because people get excited about certain type of technologies…
Like?
Like machine learning, like data science, like building data legs. I think there is much better way of approaching and deploying, developing
AI across your organizations as opposed to developing data legs and putting analytics on top of it. But I think AI projects don’t fail for ethical reasons or even safety reasons. They fail for the same reasons why traditional software projects fail. They are under-resourced, they have the wrong skills applied to it and also they are not maintainable.
So we usually recruit very smart people to manage these technologies and then what happens is those people are left to support these solutions and then they get bored and leave. So that can be very dangerous to an organisation. So building in, maintenance and support plans is critical and companies often fail to think beyond deployment of a piece of technology.