SmarterX and Advertising and marketing AI Institute’s MAICON 2025 simply wrapped, bringing 1,500 entrepreneurs and enterprise leaders collectively in Cleveland, Ohio.
The occasion featured three days of keynotes, breakouts, and workshops all centered on the explosive influence of AI throughout advertising and enterprise. However past the ways and expertise, a a lot deeper theme emerged: as AI accelerates, the worth of human connection and true innovation is changing into extra essential than ever.
Recent off the occasion, I unpacked the most important classes from MAICON with SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute founder and CEO Paul Roetzer on Episode 174 of The Artificial Intelligence Show.
The Unmistakable Worth of Human Connection
For Roetzer, the primary takeaway from the week was the palpable want for human connection. In a world more and more influenced by AI, the worth of in-person group soars.
“I feel folks simply need that group really feel, that human connection, that potential to be with one another and to encourage one another,” he says.
That tradition of generosity was on full show, with audio system brazenly sharing whole workflows and actionable methods. Roetzer additionally famous a shocking shift within the viewers make up.
“There have been lots of people there who had been simply there for the AI aspect, the enterprise aspect of the occasion, and that was actually cool to see,” he says.
10% Considering vs. 10X Considering
This enterprise focus tied straight into the core theme of Roetzer’s AI Innovation workshop held in the course of the convention.
Whereas most corporations are accurately centered on utilizing AI for effectivity and productiveness, he warns that this path has a essential catch. If an organization merely makes use of AI to do the identical quantity of labor, “we are going to want fewer people.”
The one strategy to take a accountable, human-centered method, he argues, is to develop.
“It is the one possibility. So we have now to speed up development, and that occurs by means of innovation,” Roetzer explains.
To border that, he gives the next distinction:
Optimization is utilizing AI for “10% pondering,” he says. It’s utilizing expertise to make present work higher, quicker, and cheaper. True innovation with AI, nonetheless, requires “10X pondering.”
He contrasts optimization—utilizing AI for “10% pondering” to make present processes higher, quicker, and cheaper—with true innovation, which he calls “10x pondering.”
“Innovation is utilizing AI to do new issues that create new types of worth for patrons and the group,” he says.
The “Transfer 37 Second” for Each Data Employee
Roetzer carried this theme into his opening keynote, titled “The Transfer 37 Second for Data Staff”
The discuss, named after a pivotal second within the AlphaGo documentary, explored the unsettling realization when the world’s greatest Go participant realized an AI had turn into superhuman on the sport.
“My premise was that we are going to all have that second,” Roetzer says. “It could be at particular person duties to begin. However you’ll more and more have these moments the place you understand that the AI is healthier than you on the factor you do.”
This is not only a distant concept. Roetzer factors to the huge financial incentives driving this transformation, as AI corporations construct instruments to focus on the trillions of {dollars} in wages at the moment paid to data staff within the US alone.
Whereas the subject was heavy, the last word message was considered one of alternative:
Through the keynote, Roetzer reframed the longer term as “human plus AI” not “human vs. AI.”
The Backside Line
As AI continues to automate routine duties, the true, defensible worth shifts to innovation, technique, and the uniquely human potential to attach and construct group.
It’s a lesson Roetzer plans to construct on by diversifying in-person occasions into new geographic markets.
“I am very bullish on in-person occasions as a result of you’ll be able to’t faux it,” he says. ““I feel good issues occur whenever you get actually good folks collectively.”
