AI Trainee Talk #3: Đừng bao giờ ngừng tò mò, hãy học cách lướt sóng với AI

Key Concepts

• Marketing & Customer Experience (CX): The interconnectedness of promising value (marketing) and delivering on that promise (CX).
• Talent Net Group: A company providing comprehensive HR consulting services, including recruitment, payroll, salary structure design, and HR function outsourcing.
• B2B vs. B2C Marketing: Key differences in decision-making processes, emotional vs. rational drivers, and sales cycles.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Marketing: AI's impact on understanding customers, content creation, data analysis, and its potential challenges.
• Future Workforce Skills: The importance of curiosity, communication, and connective thinking in the age of AI.

Summary

This transcript features an interview with Ms. Nguyễn Thị An Hà, Marketing and Customer Experience Director at Talent Net Group, discussing her role, the company's services, and the impact of AI on marketing.

Ms. Hà's Role and Talent Net Group's Services

Ms. Hà, an alumna of Foreign Trade University, has been with Talent Net Group since its inception 18 years ago. She initially led the marketing department, later establishing a Marketing Technology (MarTech) team and a Customer Experience (CX) team. Her current responsibilities encompass managing these three departments.

She defines marketing as deeply understanding the target audience to deliver relevant content through appropriate channels, using language that resonates and addressing their expectations. CX, conversely, is about fulfilling the promises made by marketing. She emphasizes the need for internal execution to match external promises, highlighting the synergy between "internal content" and "external forces."

Talent Net Group offers a broad spectrum of HR consulting services to businesses (B2B). These services include:

• Recruitment Consulting: Assisting companies in finding suitable candidates.
• Payroll Services: Managing payroll for large workforces, ensuring compliance with labor laws, insurance benefits, and maintaining strict data security due to the sensitive nature of salary information.
• Salary Structure Design: Advising companies on creating competitive and equitable salary frameworks that attract talent while maintaining internal fairness.
• HR Function Outsourcing: Providing comprehensive HR support, including labor contract management, insurance administration, benefits policies, training, and other functions typically handled by an HR Director.

Ms. Hà primarily interacts with business owners and HR managers as clients.

B2B vs. B2C Marketing: A Deeper Dive

Ms. Hà draws a clear distinction between B2B and B2C marketing, a topic she is passionate about sharing with younger professionals.

Similarities:

• Both require a profound understanding of customer needs, expectations, and underlying desires.
• Both acknowledge the importance of price and product quality.

Differences:

• B2C (Business-to-Consumer):
  • Decision-makers: Individuals.
  • Decision drivers: Often emotional ("I like it, so I buy it").
  • Purchase process: Quick and impulsive.
  • Brand loyalty: Consumers are easily swayed and may switch brands frequently.
  • Marketing approach: Requires speed and continuous engagement to maintain brand recall.
• B2B (Business-to-Business):
  • Decision-makers: Representatives of an entire company.
  • Decision drivers: Highly rational, requiring trust, quality assurance, and data-driven evidence.
  • Purchase process: Lengthy and complex, involving multiple departments and higher-value transactions.
  • Brand loyalty: Less prone to frequent brand switching due to the significant investment and organizational impact.
  • Marketing approach: Needs to demonstrate how decisions impact the collective, requiring a more sophisticated and in-depth approach.

Ms. Hà advises young marketers to understand that B2B marketing involves influencing decisions that affect an entire organization, demanding a more meticulous and impactful strategy. She contrasts this with B2C, where marketing often taps into individual trends and emotions.

The Role of AI in Marketing and CX

Ms. Hà confirms that AI is having a "tremendous impact" on marketing and CX, acknowledging the common fear of job displacement. She states that AI is already integrated into core marketing processes:

• Customer Understanding: AI analyzes customer interaction data across touchpoints, identifies behavioral patterns, compares them with historical data, and forecasts future trends, providing more accurate customer profiles than traditional methods.
• Content Creation: AI tools like ChatGPT and others can generate numerous content variations (e.g., 100 messages in 15 minutes) significantly faster than manual creation, which previously took hours.
• Knowledge Access: AI can access and synthesize global knowledge, offering insights that were previously limited to internal team discussions.

She emphasizes that adopting AI is not optional but a necessity for staying competitive.

Challenges and Nuances of AI Implementation

Despite its benefits, AI presents challenges:

• Tool Overload: The sheer volume of AI tools can be overwhelming, leading to confusion and difficulty in selection, similar to having too many product choices.
• Emotional Disconnect: While AI provides logical, data-driven outputs, these may not always resonate emotionally with the target audience. This can lead to a situation where AI generates many options, but none are truly effective, requiring human review and refinement. Ms. Hà likens this to AI generating 100 songs, but none being particularly good, whereas human creativity might produce one exceptional piece in the same timeframe.
• The Human Element: AI is a tool, not a replacement for human judgment. The core marketing principle of understanding the customer remains paramount. AI can provide data, but humans must interpret it based on context, experience, and the specific needs of stakeholders (e.g., a data-driven boss versus a creativity-focused boss).

Ms. Hà believes AI will not eliminate jobs but will displace those who fail to adapt and learn to use it. She advocates for viewing AI in three ways:

1. As a Friend/Colleague: Engaging with AI to improve its understanding of individual needs.
2. As a Tool: Utilizing AI to enhance efficiency and save time and effort.
3. As a Counterpart/Debater: Using AI to challenge and refine one's own ideas.

She stresses that the ability to leverage AI effectively, combined with foundational knowledge and experience, is crucial for success.

Essential Skills for the Future Workforce

Ms. Hà identifies key skills for young professionals entering the job market, particularly in the context of AI:

1. Curiosity: This is the most critical skill for the future. It drives continuous learning and adaptability in a rapidly changing world. Curiosity enables quick learning and staying relevant.
2. Communication: Beyond basic conversation, this involves understanding and empathizing with others to achieve specific goals. Communication styles must adapt to different audiences (supervisors, clients, colleagues). The goal is to convey information effectively to gain acceptance and achieve objectives efficiently.
3. Connective Thinking (Tư duy kết nối): This involves synthesizing disparate pieces of information and tools (like AI) to achieve a larger objective. Instead of seeing individual "dots" (e.g., AI tools, customer needs), professionals must learn to connect them to form a coherent strategy and reach goals. This is about understanding how AI can serve the ultimate customer objective, not just knowing about AI tools.

She concludes by advising young professionals to embrace AI ("embrace" like surfing a wave) rather than fear it. She acknowledges that even experienced professionals like herself are learning and adapting. The current era, where AI is still evolving and its applications are being explored, presents a unique opportunity for everyone to learn and grow together, ensuring they keep pace with the times.