Marketing in an AI World: The Skills Students Still Need to Build

Hey, welcome back to another episode of AGI Schools Out Saturdays. We're talking about preparing students for their future, not our past. This is going to be a great episode because I have David Lacombe, who's just become an author. He wrote Marketing to a T and published it. He's also a fractional CMO and an educator. And honestly, like A, I think David's a great dude. B, before AI hit, marketing was something that I would have... If you asked me if I could go back to school for anything, what would I go back to school for? It would have been marketing. Sensei, I'm not 100% certain that that would be my answer. So, David, tell us a little bit about yourself and then let's dive into your book and what the future of marketing looks like.

Yeah. Well, the thing you didn't mention about me that I think we share in common is that I was a paramedic long before I was a marketer. And so at the end of my paramedic career, I was thinking, what's next? And I thought I could leverage my expertise and help product companies build better products for EMS and emergency medicine. So that was my shift. And so for a long, long time, I worked for an international company that was helping make patient care safer. And that was a lot of fun. About four years ago, I went out onto my own. And that's a big, scary world. So I thought, what am I good at? What do people need? And how can it help? And I thought it was all about helping people go to market more confidently. So a lot of decisions you have to make. Sometimes we're overly biased based on things that we hope will come true versus the reality of the external world. The world does get a vote. So that's what I do now. And I'm fortunate to teach graduate marketing students at Yeshiva University in New York City. And in fact, we had our first class today. This is a capstone class. So off to a good start.

That's awesome. And you even produced a book, man, which I got to come to your launch party. I mean, that's exciting. Becoming an author, that's a feat.

Yeah, well, it was great to see you at the launch party. I'm independently published. So that really means I had an idea that I didn't think could wait. Traditionally, you go and find an agent who's going to shop your book around, then maybe somebody will make you an offer. And then two or three years later, if you're lucky, like it goes out and like, this has got to get out right now. Not that I moved that much more quickly because it took about three years from the time that I had the idea to get started to it actually becoming a thing. But I was at least in control of most of it.

And I think that's where we met, wasn't it? You reached out to me for an interview when I was doing some marketing for a community paramedicine company.

Yeah, 100%. I was, I was looking for people who could give me insights and pointers and like what makes marketers effective. And there were so many different people from different backgrounds, including your own that, you know, really kind of created the overall arc of a story and they're also valuable. So yeah, we, we met there and we've stayed in touch since and grateful for it.

Yeah. Likewise. 100%. So you went out on your own four years