In the final lesson lesson from the AI + Innovation Stage, host, Livia Bernardini, writes about the wrong Mark Evans but the right lesson on what AI can teach us about being human.

What would you do if you turned up to present to an almost empty room, in scorching heat and your co-presenter stood you up? Well, I think doing what Mark Taylor did is the only way up. 

The AI and Innovation stage was jammed all week, with people queuing outside for most sessions. Then, almost by magic, at 15:55 on Wednesday, the room emptied. Mark Taylor, CEO of Automated Analytics, walked on to deliver "Growth, Not Cuts: Is Your AI Strategy Leaving Money on the Table?" He spoke to just a handful of people, and I suspected half of them worked for him. Perhaps it was the suggestion that one might need a strategy about AI rather than a subscription. Go figure. To add insult to injury, the client he was meant to present with, Mark Evans, had pulled out at the last minute because his wife was giving birth, which is exactly where he should have been.

I duly sent my congratulations. To a different Mark Evans. A Mark Evans who is well beloved in our marketing circle and who had, I learned after an embarrassing few WhatsApp messages, no baby on the way and no idea why a woman with an accent you could hear through the typing was sending him felicitations on a hot Wednesday afternoon. Well, if nothing else, it was at least a chance to say hi and have a laugh once the mystery unfolded.

So Mark Taylor was alone. Almost alone with the tiniest audience ever on that stage and alone with a presentation built for two presenters. 

And he did it anyway. With a smile on his face, grace and brilliance, which is why I hope to give him the audience he deserves here instead. You see, this is also what being human is about: do the right thing and look after each other as much as you can.

What you should know about Mark and his company

His franchise client was spending around £35,000 a month with Google and Meta across more than a hundred branches. Online bookings were tracked properly, yet roughly 40% of bookings happened over the phone, meaning two in five results were invisible to the very platforms deciding where the money went. Fixing that made £161,000 a year without a penny more being spent. 

This is what he means when he says AI does not create value so much as reveal where it is leaking. 

Put your money where your mouth is, they say, and in this case his product found them money they did not know they had. And who doesn’t like that. 

So, be more human

Back in May I wrote a piece for MAD//Fest arguing that trying to find out what "be more human" was about was a bit too complicated. The human at this point in history is distracted, overstimulated and outsourcing her thinking way too often. So I gave up typing to tell you how to be more human and opted for the wiser advice to “be more octopus” instead. I stand by the octopus article - I still like it very much. Yet something changed after MAD//Fest.

And I now have the answer. 

People buy people. We always have and we always will, whatever is in the stack. There is nobody I would rather have next to me making sense of what is working and what is not than Mark Taylor. Or have Max Ottignon and Jack Cully by my side to hold my nerve when I am about to be told I am wrong and I am not, or Martin Karaffa and Christina Habib holding my hand to make sure I make the most of culture and not an ass of myself. People. Buy. People. 

Being human is doing the right thing and being there for each other when we can. Filling my closing newsletter with Mark's success stories is my little human way to try to make up for a stage that was absurdly empty for those thirty minutes only. And if you want to do the human thing too, ping him on Linkedin or book a demo via Automated Analytics and learn how you could sort out your attribution once and for all.  You would have come to get more info from him if you had been there to listen to a great presentation. Next year. 

One stage, and finally one answer to the question I could not crack back in May. 

Who you stand with is the whole of it, and I got lucky with the people on that stage this summer. 

Come and keep me company on Substack, where I carry on about training intuition. Together. It's free.

And if you happen to be the “right” Mark Evans, who might not be sleeping much at the moment, congratulations to you… again.