Transcription
We're unbelievably skeptical. If you wanted to go and buy cakes for all your clients who are listening online, okay, you'd have to do a cost-benefit analysis and you'd have to go through this immense level of justifying yourself to the finance function. Partly because cakes are nice and enjoyable and therefore they're treated with suspicion by the finance function, okay?
And yet we make these enormous business decisions like open-plan offices, for example, and no one does any empirical work whatsoever and even when you do do the measurement and it comes back negative, everybody just completely ignores it. So there's something weird going on here, I think, in terms of our assessment, our ability objectively to assess what's going on here.
You know, we're we're in that weird kind of world where um nobody considers the I mean, this is my point about nobody considers Nobody in business ever considers the opportunity cost of investing in tech. And so we and one of the things, you know, my employer, WPP, has spent a few hundred million investing in in in uh in AI. I think it's probably a good thing to do, but nobody said, "Well, with that money, you could hire all of the world's best copywriters, okay?"
>> Yeah.
>> For the next 15 years. Would that actually be a more valuable thing to do? Perfectly worthwhile to ask, but strangely tech has this magical property, which is that money spent on tech is automatically assumed to be both future-proofing you and increasing your efficiency and therefore it doesn't receive the same scrutiny as money spent on anything else.
>> No, interesting.
>> Least of all human beings.