Opinion piece by the director of CMS MAG, Jorge Mediavilla
Time flies. Before you know it you find yourself pushing fifty and that, whether you like it or not, gives you some experience. Enough to know that if the plan in a company or another organization like a political party is to cut costs, then you had better look for another party or company.
In my humble experience, whenever the plan is to save on taxis or bring out the chainsaw, you are guaranteed to get smacked sooner or later. There is nothing admirable about cuts. Most of the time they only prolong the agony and, in reality, anyone with no backbone can propose them and carry them out.
What really matters, what is admirable, is having a clever plan with purpose and ambition to make money, a master plan to pull a country or a company forward, something credible that employees, the market and the public will buy into.
Something similar happens with AI. The other day I was reading a WAN-IFRA study that suggested that only 9% of newspapers had observed and could reliably state, backed by data, that generative AI applied in their newsrooms had produced more direct revenue. The rest only reported significant benefits in efficiency, productivity and agility, that is, cost savings.
It is not that creating more efficiency is entirely bad, but the freed up time must be used to generate more quality, there must be a plan to improve credibility, build more community and generate more subscribers. If we use that efficiency to create more mediocre content, we will simply contribute to greater infoxication and saturate even further a market that is already saturated and has hardly any barriers to entry where YouTubers move like fish in water.
What is really interesting is to put together a clever plan to make more money with AI. This is the real challenge for a good executive. If in your company people talk more about cost savings than about generating direct revenue, then you already know what to do.
* Original article written in Spanish, translated with AI and reviewed in English by Jorge Mediavilla.
